![]() ![]() Addie’s son is entering a midlife crack-up, his marriage and career collapsing, and his mother’s choice feels like a betrayal.įor a brief period, Addie and Louis take in Addie’s grandchild, Jamie, while his parents undergo a painful separation. Just as their relationship takes flight it confronts the sheering wind of their children’s rebuke. They hold hands in public, and then kiss, and then carefully venture back into the world of simple pleasures: lunch with a companion, theatre, talking at night in the dark. Packed into less than 200 pages are all the issues late life provokes.īoth Addie and Louis feel guilt at first, but eventually their happiness gently pushes it back, as if a dish refused. ![]() In a country where so many people are living so much longer, you almost wonder why a book of this nature has not emerged sooner. The children who will never stop being children. Their lives, held on pause so long, are about to begin again, but first they must get to know each other.Īnd thus night by night, like senior-age Scheherazades, they crawl into bed and tell each other the story of their lives: the missed opportunities, the happinesses, the great and unsolvable griefs, the questions that remain. A book to make the reader smile, maybe shed a tear or two, then smile anew, Our Souls at Night is absolutely charming.Addie and Louis share a glass of wine in her kitchen, the air clouded with memories of their former partners. Despite its emphases on aging, I found it life-affirming, freezing the past and freeing the future. It is also a novel about old age itself, about lost chances, about happiness and loss. Most important, I would call Our Souls at Night a novel of possibilities, one of meaningful love without lust, of affection with ageless affirmation. I can relate to their conduct and their conversations, their shared consolations. Now, however, I am of Addie and Louis’s generation. Would I have come to the same conclusion if I were thirty years younger? Perhaps not. This reader, at least, trusts Haruf’s creative voice, as Addie and Louis’s engagement with one another deepens from page to page. Would they so involve themselves? Would they talk this way? I think the answer is yes, a positive answer that is a measure of Haruf’s success. Reading their exchanges, I tried to imagine my own long-widowed grandmother in such a situation or my parents. Addie’s grandson vacations at her house for a time, which adds another dimension to his grandmother’s relationship with Louis.Īs the friendship intensifies between Addie and Louis, the laconic tone continues. They discuss their adult children, too, adult children who later appear in Our Souls at Night to confront their aging parents about the small town scandal the “affair” appears to be. Louis’s wife died in hospice care after a lingering and painful illness, while Addie’s husband dropped dead in the midst of a church service. They recount the deaths of their spouses. They tell each other about their respective spouses, confessing their own weaknesses as partners and parents. They share an emotional intimacy rather than a physical one, building a richness that encircles their lives.Īddie and Louis’s conversations cover a spectrum of familial subjects. Even when the story moves to daytime scenes, the language remains the same, as if the two were talking cheek to cheek. Written in crisp but sparse prose, the novel replicates their midnight conversations. Our Souls at Night features an older generation, a lonely widow and a solitary widower in their early seventies who somewhat precipitously decide to sleep together, not as lovers, but as friends. #Our souls at night book reviews fullTogether, Haruf’s six stand-alone novels give the reader a full portrait of contemporary middle America, conveying the energies and the enervation, the hopes and the fears, the strength and the weaknesses, of flyover country. Each differs in that it centers on a new set of main characters. Each of his books takes place in Holt, a small town where everybody seems to know everyone else. A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and. Published posthumously, Our Souls at Night is Kent Haruf’s final novel about a fictional community in eastern Colorado. ![]()
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