In Our Souls at Night Kent Haruf returns to the small fictional town of Holt, Colorado for a quiet, tender tale of friendship and happiness in later life.
The novel opens in a way that suggests we’re dropping in on a neighbour sharing an anecdote about two other residents of this
“And then there was the day Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters,” we hear. What follows is an unusual request and the beginning of a relationship that gets tongues wagging around them.
Addie, a widow, asks the widower Louis if he’d consider going over to her house sometimes to sleep with her.
“What,” says Louis, naturally a bit taken about. “How do you mean?” And she says: “I mean we’re both alone. We’ve been together for too long. For years. I’m lonely.I think you might be too, I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me. And talk.”
Addie isn’t looking for a physical relationship. She just wants the comfort of companionship, someone with whom she can share the highlights or lowlights of the day.
These people have lived most of their lives in Holt, a small community where everyone knows everyone else, so they’re not strangers. But they’ve never had more than casual encounters until now.
They lay next to each other and listenend to the rain. “So life hasn’t turned out right for either of us, not the way we expected,’ he said.
‘Except it feels good now, at this moment.” “Better than I have every reason to deserve.”
The arrangement they make evolves into a relationship in which they talk, about their pasts, about their now dead partners and about their hopes and dreams. Their lives hadn’t turned out the way they’d hoped — Louis dreamed of being a poet but ended up a schoolteacher; Addie’s plans to become a teacher floundered with a pregnancy at the age of twenty, and she drifted into secretarial work. Their bed-time chats are tinged with disappointments and sorrow but through them they find a new form of contentment.
Of course their neighbours think there’s more going on than either Addie or Louis will admit. Addie’s son (whom she seldom sees) is outraged — Louis is just a chancer, out to swindle his mum out of her money he reckons. Problems ensue.
Our Souls at Night is a perfectly judged study of two mature people who find happiness and a new purpose in life until family pressures get in the way of their companionship. This could so easily have turned into a shallow, over-sweetened sentimental mush of a tale. Instead in Kent Haruf’s hands we get a wonderfully subtle tale of companionship in later life.
It’s told in the kind of unadorned prose that sucks you into thinking this is just a simple tale of two ordinary people in a fairly ordinary place. Yet underneath the novel captures the tension between how older people want to live — and how others think they should.
Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we’d still have something like this. That it turns out we’re not finished with changes and excitements. And not all dried up in body and spirit.
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