One May evening in Holt, Colorado, septuagenarian and widow Addie Moore makes her way to the home of Louis Waters, a widower also in his 70s. They’ve lived within a block of each other for decades, and Addie had always admired Louis’ wife. After exchanging a few pleasantries, Addie says she has a proposal for Louis.
She gets cold feet for just a moment, then stiffens her spine and makes her pitch. Here’s the dialogue from page three of this novel:
I’m listening, Louis said.
I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me.
What? How do you mean?
I mean we’re both alone. We’ve been by ourselves 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.
He stared at her, watching her, curious now, cautious.
You don’t say anything. Have I taken your breath away? she said.
I guess you have.
I’m not talking about sex.
I wondered.
No, not sex. I’m not looking at it that way. I think I’ve lost any sexual impulse a long time ago. I’m talking about getting through the night. And lying warm in bed, companionably. Lying down in bed together and you staying the night. The nights are the worst. Don’t you think?
Yes, I think so.
I end up taking pills to go to sleep and reading too late and then I feel groggy the next day. No use at all to myself or anybody else.
I’ve had that myself.
But I think I could sleep again if there were someone in bed with me. Someone nice. The closeness of that. Talking in the nights, in the dark. She waited. What do you think?
Louis asks for some time to consider her idea, then goes the next day for a haircut — the barber gives him a shave as well — and calls Addie and says, I’d like to come over tonight if that’s still all right.
And there you go. These nightly sleepovers provide the basic plot for Kent Haruf’s “Our Souls at Night.” Addie and Louis embark on a companionship that turns into soul-love, sharing stories from their past while lying close together in bed, the ups and downs of their marriages, their difficulties with their grown children, their failed dreams, their memories from the good and bad seasons of their lives.
Of course, the present intrudes on their relationship. Their acquaintances in town are soon aware of these nightly assignations, though they believe these get-togethers stem from some oldster act of lust or strange courtship, never knowing that the Addie and Louis, at least for most of the story, simply talk and hold hands.
Addie has a son who was permanently scarred from childhood when his younger sister died after being stuck by a car, Louis a daughter who is a free spirit but with bad luck when it comes to men. Both hear through the grape vine about their parents, and each separately urges them to break off these nocturnal visits. At one point, Addie must watch over her six-year-old grandson Jamie after her son’s wife has left him. Rather than put distance between Addie and Louis, the boy draws them even closer together through a series of activities they devise to relieve his anxieties, and he in turn begins to look at Louis as if he were his grandfather.
To tell more of this story would ruin its ending — which is unexpected.
For me, “Our Souls at Night” appealed on multiple levels. The book is a fast read, the characters real, and the terse prose beautiful in its precision and emotional exactitude.
Haruf’s tale also invites its readers to examine their own lives. The bed and the darkness become a sort of confessional for Addie and Louis as they come to know each other better. They talk of the mistakes they’ve made, of the faults of their former spouses, of things they wish they’d done differently. An odd cleansing takes place in their sharing of secrets, as if they were mopping up all the mess of the past so as to be pure enough to truly love each other.
Haruf and his fictional town of Holt were new to me. Clay Jenkinson’s online article “Farewell to One of the Plains Great Writers, Kent Haruf” caught my eye, and Haruf’s posthumous “Our Souls at Night” lived up to the praise the reviewer had showered on the author’s other work. Eventually I hope to read one or more of those novels.
“Our Souls at Night” is fiction at its finest: engaging, real, and touching and lovely in the impression it leaves on its readers.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” minick0301@gmail.com .)