Our Souls at Night

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.

Our Souls at Night is a quiet little book, told in the sparest of prose, and teeming with lovely moments. I haven't read Kent Haruf before, but as I understand his work, it all centers on this fictional small town of Holt, Colorado – where everyone knows your business and isn't afraid to tell you what they think of it – and as Haruf knew that he was dying as he wrote this book, there's an added poignancy to the notion that he was writing at the end of his life about an elderly couple who decide to more fully embrace life while they're still around for it. Looking at other reviews, this may be a more rewarding reading experience for people who have visited Haruf's world before, and as for me, I certainly liked it very much. I was nicely jarred by the opening line: 

And then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters. It was an evening in May just before full dark.

Beginning a book with the word “And” felt comfortingly familiar, like the beginning of a fairy tale (which must feel doubly so to those readers who recognise the setting and would see this as a continuation of Haruf's larger story) and also tantalisingly mysterious: Just who is Addie and what's her relationship with Louis? As it turns out, they've been neighbours for over four decades, and while Addie had been friendly with Louis' late wife, she had never really spoken before with Louis himself. And she has come with a proposition: As they are both now in their seventies and living alone, would Louis be interested in coming over to sleep with her sometimes? Just lay in bed at night, talk for a while after the lights go out, and enjoy the comfort of hearing someone breathing on the pillow next to yours through the dark and lonely hours? After some thinking, Louis admits that sounds like a good idea. The rest of the book details these late night talks – in which they go over the history of their lives – their growing daylight friendship, the reaction of the community (including the negative reactions of their grown children who live far away), and the various delights and complications that real life tends to throw out. As not very much happens plot-wise, Our Souls at Night is mostly about the writing (so I'll quote at length to demonstrate), and Haruf uses two devices extensively: Realistic and self-reflective dialogue, without quote marks – 

   Louis said, It was awful for her that last year. She was just always sick. They tried chemotherapy and radiation and that slowed it for a while but it was still there and it never was out of her system completely. She got worse and she didn't want to have any more treatments. She was just wasting away.

   I remember, Addie said. I wanted to help.

   I know. You and all the others brought food. I appreciated that. And the flowers.

   But I never saw her in her bedroom.

   No. She didn't want any company upstairs except Holly and me. She didn't want anybody to see her, how she looked then in the last months. And she didn't want to talk. She was afraid of death. Nothing I said made any difference.

   Aren't you afraid of death?

   Not like I was. I've come to believe in some kind of afterlife. A return to our true selves, a spirit self. We're just in this physical body till we go back to spirit.

   I don't know if I believe that, Addie said. Maybe you're right. I hope you are.

   We'll see, won't we. But not yet.

   No, not yet, Addie said. I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.

And frequent rambling paragraphs that compress large experiences into run-on sentences – 

In the morning they had pancakes and eggs and bacon and then tidied up the camp and put the food and cooking pans in the cooler in the back of the pickup truck and drove up farther in the mountains on the highway to Monarch Pass and stopped and got out at the Continental Divide and looked out over the western slope and if their eyes had been good enough and if they could have seen over the curvature of the earth they could have seen the Pacific Ocean a thousand miles away across the mountains. At noon they drove back to their camp and ate cheese sandwiches and apples and drank cold water from the old-fashioned well, pumping it out with the green pump handle, and then took a hike up to the waterfalls on North Fork Creek and sat and watched the water crash down into the clear green pool below. When they hiked down to the bottom, the air was cooler near the falls, the air misted on their faces.

So as for the writing: It didn't make me swoon with delight, and in the end, I didn't find the story all that touching. I didn't really identify with the largely negative reaction of the community, but this might have been set up by Haruf's earlier books about Holt; I'm sure his regular readers would have gotten a good laugh out of Louis and Addie complaining about the author who writes about their (fictional) town without ever really capturing the folks there. In the big picture: I tend to appreciate a story about lonely people looking for human connection and it feels fresh to me that this story featured senior citizens; this book feels like it ought to be very important, but I didn't actually find it all that important. And I'm willing to accept that the fault may have been mine for reading Haruf out of order.