Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say (releasing May 5, 2026 from Random House) opens with a delightfully intimate and mundane darkness that made me fall in love with Olive Kitteridge. In her new novel, Artie Dam is a high school teacher who once coached soccer but now that his belly has grown a little bigger with age, he coaches basketball, avoiding the awkward jog of the belly up and down the long soccer field each practice and game. Artie doesn’t seem to resent his position or age but rather presents as a kind man, one you might want to have a beer or a glass of wine with on a Friday night after a long week of teaching.
In the opening chapter, Artie brings me back to years of teaching high school and playing and coaching soccer and the incredible privilege of watching teenaged voices find themselves. Artie is likeable and finds comradery in fellow teachers who give so much for so little. Artie is a beloved teacher by both his students and school and enjoys appreciations that are so rare for so many. Teachers are in many ways on the front lines of our collective futures, their students’ futures, their student’s families’ futures’, countries’ futures, the world’s, and equally important, the continued existence of critical thought. Artie demands an immediate empathy that perhaps only a teacher can fully understand, which is to say, I am rooting for Artie from the start. And he needs someone to root for him, we soon realize:
Drowning was the most plausible. He could take his sailboat far out and slip over the side, but how could he do that without people figuring it out? His sailboat had a deep and heavy keel, it would take a hurricane to flip the boat over, and the sides were high enough that he could not just fall off as he would want people to think he could. But still, drowning remained at the top of the list.
Does it not sometimes feel, now, as though we are all drowning? Coincidentally, I recently watched Honey Bunch directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, the Canadian powerhouse behind Violation (2020). Honey Bunch also opens with water and the sense of floating and by nature, drowning, a sort of chiaroscuro effect I have always had in the water, an awareness of surface tensions, the above and below of it, the tip of the iceberg, if you will, and as it happens, this chiaroscuro moves so beautifully into the realms of relationships, yes? In Honey Bunch Diana, played by Grace Glowicki, and her husband Homer, played by Ben Petrie, navigate the former’s traumatic brain injury after a car accident. Homer whisks Diana off to an undisclosed mansion in what feels like a Victorian estate in rural England but you can’t be sure as the production was filmed in Canada and the characters are an international mix of American, Irish and French. The trauma facility’s practices, you are to understand, are on the fringes of science but soon realize that their practices are, in fact, quite a bit beyond the fringe. As Diana receives her pills and treatments, one begins to share her sense of drowning within her own cognition, a sort of losing of self within the self, submerged in one’s own memories. Like Strout’s work, Honey Bunch is a work that bends its genres toward something bigger than ourselves and stays with you long after the final page and the final credits have rolled. Both works highly recommended individually and in quick succession if you are so inclined.
It is no exaggeration to say that critical theories saved my life. And I suspect critical theories have saved many lives, individuals seeking to know themselves and what they think of the world and art and policies better. If I had not explored critical theories as a young woman, as an intellectual being, I would never have survived the world. And I have a deep despair for students in need of this now and starving for it under such censorship. It is not the world they deserve.
