Elizabeth Strout says I probably have one book left in me

Jessie Thompson, The Independent

Elizabeth Strout found the hero of her latest novel, The Things We Never Say, in an unlikely place. Well, actually, her friend did. "We've known each other forever, and he sent me a page of old obituaries that he found from, like, the Sixties and Seventies. It sounds weird, but whatever," she tells me. "So I was looking at them and there was this man's face that was so ordinary and kind and pleasant, and just as ordinary as a face could be."

The man's face stayed with her, until one day she realised this was Artie Dam, an unassuming history teacher in late middle age whose life was full of secrets. After crochety Olive Kitteridge, who won Strout the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and quiet, courageous Lucy Barton, who Laura Linney played at London's Bridge Theatre in 2018, Artie is Strout's first major new protagonist for many years, in her first novel set outside of her native Maine. "He was just so quotidian-looking, you know?" says Strout, 70.

"Quotidian" is a word often used to describe the charm of Strout's books, which have sold over two million copies around the world. They revel in seemingly unremarkable lives, communities where people come and go, harbouring secret grudges and passions, suffocating in private shame or plagued by a sense of loneliness and disconnection. Literary heavyweights from Hilary Mantel to Elena Ferrante to Zadie Smith have praised her work, but what moves her the most are the shy, shaky readers who queue up to meet her in book signing lines and whisper about what her novels have meant to them. A nervous Italian woman once told her, through an interpreter, "You have seen into my soul."

The New Yorker described Strout's fiction as "both cosy and eerie, as comforting and unsettling as a fairy tale". That's true of the story of Artie Dam; he's a respected teacher, a loyal husband, caring father and good friend, but he's also dogged by thoughts of suicide. A moral man troubled by the political direction of his country, he's lost the ability to make small talk at dinner parties, inviting bewildered looks as he tries to initiate discussions about free will. "I wonder why people never say anything real," he wonders aloud to his wife after one depressing social event.

At the heart of the novel is a revelation that shifts the ground underneath Artie's feet, suddenly turning those closest to him into strangers. One of the only people he can really talk to is an old friend called Ken Moynihan — who turns out, to Artie's surprise, to be a Republican. Does Strout have Republican friends? "Yes. I have a very, very good friend — who sent me that obituary," she says. She and her friend get around their political differences by ignoring them, just like Artie and Ken. "We simply never talked about it," she tells me, adding that she has seen "families where there are very deep fractures" because of the febrile state of American politics.

The Things We Never Say was written in the lead-up to Trump's second presidential victory, and the result of the election is a dividing line in the novel, after which the world around Artie seems to slowly start to degrade. When I asked if Strout's famous empathy extends to the president, she's blunt. "No." In America, she says, "there are many rumblings and divides, and I have no idea how it will turn out".

It's a political novel, and, like many of Strout's books, a desperately sad one. She says she didn't realise how sad until she read it back. Loneliness hums through her stories like a low, blinking lightbulb. Does she often feel lonely herself? "I was thinking just the other day — I don't actually feel lonely. I mean sometimes, once in a while, I think, 'Oh, I feel so lonely.' But that's very rare. But I'm aware that it's a theme in my work and so I think I must be plugging into the isolation that we all have just by being inside our own selves and our own bodies, and bumping up against each other, trying to have these moments of grace."

Her novels are full of that strange incongruousness. There's something hypnotic about her spare prose, her homely, wise storytelling, which lures you into a false sense of security until it pierces you with a moment of unflinching emotional insight. Conversation with her is like this, too. Appearing on my screen in tortoise shell glasses, wearing a pink scarf, her blonde hair pinned back, she's matter-of-fact. She doesn't elaborate if she doesn't want to, but almost glimmers with a sense of fascination about other people. "All my life, that's all I've ever wanted to know: what it feels like to be another person, just even for five minutes. So I guess I have to make them up in order to know."

All my life, that's all I've ever wanted to know: what it feels like to be another person, just even for five minutes Strout grew up in Maine, where her father was a professor and her mother an English teacher.