I was more excited about getting to read Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel The Things We Never Say than I am about having read it. I tend to like Strout’s novels more than I expect, so I thought that this one, and especially its fifty-seven-year-old high school history teacher protagonist named Artie, would be even better. Artie, like so many of us, is beset by a loneliness that as its epigraph attests comes from his alienation in the midst of others. Artie and his wife of many years Evie are struggling with the emotional aftermath of their son Rob’s car crash…