Kent Haruf (image courtesy Penguin Random House)Ī love story writ small, though large in its emotional scope and effect, Our Souls at Night is one of those transcendentally moving novels that accomplishes a huge amount in 179 masterfully-rendered pages. What makes Our Souls at Night so powerful is that it doesn’t make out that these possibilities are thick on the ground and ready for the taking, and that when they come to fruition, they should be treasured and held close, even if life makes it hard for them to go the distance. Told with infinite care and understanding of the human condition but movingly alive with the happiness and joy of real, life-changing connection, the kind that remarks lives in ways no one expects, Our Souls at Night is a weighty delight, the kind of book that reminds you to never give up on life or its rich possibilities.
The decision by Addie to flout the opinions of neighbours and friends and pursue an unorthodox friendship and then more with Louis, though the road there is slow and sensitively travelled in ways that will make you hear ache with love for both Addie and Louis and the close bonds they forge, is wondrously nuanced but powerfully moving resulting in the kind of quiet, deep-seated happiness that neither expected to feel again, if ever.Īs nights spent talking before sleep move on, each comes to realise that what they thought they knew about their neighbour was incomplete and put together through gossip, half-realised conversations and tangential connection, and that maybe they are what each other needs as they move into the twilight of their lives.
Thankfully Addie, and later Louis emboldened by her example, don’t care, preferring to stave off the nighttime suffocation of loneliness than meet restrictive societal expectations which seems to preference observance of arcane standards over actual, meaningful connection. She went along the sidewalk under the trees and turned in at Louis’s house.” (P. It had been warm in the day but it had turned off cool now in the evening. They lived a block apart on Cedar Street in the oldest part of town with elm trees and hackberry and a single maple grown up along the curb back from the sidewalk of the two-story houses.
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It was an evening in May just before full dark. “And then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters. In this exquisitely rendered, poignant story of two older people, Addie Moore and Louis Waters, we find two people who are lonely in their isolation, estranged in a sense from those who belong to them and to whom they belong, and looking for some sort of meaningful connection.īut in the often closeminded small town of Holt, Colorado, the setting for all of Haruf’s books, openness to the new and the transformative is not exactly common, and when Addie suggests to Louis that they spend their nights together in chaste and platonic companionship, many people think it scandalous or risky, an abrogation of propriety and good, decent social behvaiour. While Kent Haruf’s final novel, Our Souls at Night, wasn’t written with the status quo-busting messiness of the pandemic in mind – the author penned the short but powerful novel in 2014 shortly before his death, with the book published posthumously in 2015 – it does go deep into the heart of one of the central themes of recent times, belonging and connection, both of which have proven difficult to keep alive when social gatherings, travel and physical intimacy have been in soul-sapping short supply. Happiness has been in short supply over the last couple of years as the COVID pandemic has run rife through once iron-clad certainties and disrupted lives in ways that were unpredictable and often unceasing. (cover image courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
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