Complicated People

Today’s novel is The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout. It’s about one man and his inner life. Here’s a passage that captures the man and the way that Strout portrays him

“[He] thought that now, after all these years, he was finally becoming a grownup. What did he mean by that? That he was finally beginning to understand the multitudinous aspect of people. He was amazed by it, really, now that he thought about it. In his study of history, he had learned about the leaders, and the various groups involved, but he had somehow missed this fact about every single person: that they held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe.

“And he understood that it could make a person lonely; people had to take and give to one another whatever they could. If it was not enough…Well, then it meant one just had to be a grownup.” (p. 185)

This book is about complicated people. I have never really liked complicated people by which I mean people who take their emotional states and their feelings about other people too seriously, and constantly ruminate about them. And who worry about being a grownup (or not). When I was an adolescent, I was surrounded by such people, as it’s a common trait of adolescents. Most of the reasonable people I knew outgrew it during college or shortly afterwards. In this novel all the supposed grownups are complicated people who love wallowing in whatever they feel or what they fear or what they think other people fear about them. I don’t like them. But I did read the entire book, since it’s not very long.

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