Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say is, on its surface, a quiet novel about an ordinary man carrying an extraordinary accumulation of secrets. But beneath that lies a more unsettling question: how much truth can a life, or a relationship, actually bear?

Artie Dam is a husband, father and much-loved teacher who nevertheless experiences a profound loneliness. Around him, almost everyone is withholding something. His son Rob discovers that Artie is not his biological father. Artie learns this but cannot tell his wife, Evie, that he knows. Rob cannot speak openly about aspects of his work. Artie conceals his own shoplifting and, more significantly, the period in which he contemplated suicide. Again and again, Strout presents people who love one another while remaining partly unknowable to each other.

The obvious conclusion is that these silences diminish them. Artie himself longs for people to say something “real”, and much of his loneliness seems to arise from the gulf between what people feel and what they are prepared to disclose.

Yet Strout makes the proposition much less comfortable than that.

When Artie learns that Rob is not biologically his son, the truth changes remarkably little. He still loves Rob. He still loves Evie. Even his relationship with Rob’s biological father remains essentially intact. One is therefore left wondering what would actually be achieved by dragging the secret fully into the light. Would truth liberate them, or merely inflict pain in the name of honesty?

That ambiguity is the novel’s great strength.

We like to imagine that intimacy means complete disclosure: that loving another person requires us to reveal our deepest fears, failures and desires. But perhaps human relationships depend equally upon discretion, privacy and the occasional merciful lie. There are things we do not say because we are frightened or ashamed, but there are also things we do not say because saying them would serve no purpose beyond transferring our burden to somebody else.

Strout never resolves the contradiction. Instead, she leaves us somewhere in the uncomfortable middle. A life in which nothing important is ever said becomes lonely and diminished. But a world in which everything is confessed may be impossible to live in.

Perhaps the fullness of a human life lies in knowing the difference.