“I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight,” Louis says. They’re nervous as teenagers, unsure about what they’re up to and what they can expect from each other, but they possess the wisdom and kindness of long, contemplative lives. Watching Addie and Louis tiptoe into this self-conscious plan for intimacy is a pleasure. “I don’t know how this will go,” he confesses. I’m not going to live that way anymore.” And so she waits while Louis gets his hair cut, takes a long hot shower, trims his fingernails, packs his pajamas in a paper bag and walks over to her house. “I made up my mind I’m not going to pay attention to what people think,” Addie says. And if the possibility of sex in the golden years isn’t being entirely ignored or derided for comic effect, it’s being announced on magazine covers like the discovery of levitation.Īddie and Louis know all this, but they’re determined to make one last attempt at happiness even at the risk of scandalizing their adult children and town busybodies. Popular entertainment spews out stereotypes about older people and their cloying desire for companionship. After all, we live in a culture fiercely intolerant of any articulated prejudice except ageism. That’s a question not just for Louis, but for us. Instead, she’s devised a solution: “I think I could sleep again if there were someone else in bed with me,” she tells Louis. She’s tired of her isolated life and particularly of those long nights, but she has no intention of checking out early. When the time comes, we’ll move them to an institution where they can be tended by cheery strangers until they pass away in drugged incoherence.īut for some reason that modern pact doesn’t appeal to Addie. Decent folk know that old people are supposed to live lives of resolute solitude to protect their dignity (and our inheritance). Half-a-century after the sexual revolution, in the shame-free age of Tinder, Blendr, Grindr et al., it’s funny how bold Addie’s proposal sounds. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me.” He invites her to sit in the living room, and after a few sputtering starts, she make an outlandish proposal: “I’m lonely. When Addie knocks on Louis’s door, he knows her only as the widow of a local insurance salesman. Indeed, what older folks are allowed to expect from their lives becomes the central theme of this slim but never slight book. Neither has any reason to expect the remaining years will offer relief from the arid rituals of retirement in a small town. Both live alone, nursing memories of doleful marriages they stuck with until illness stole away their spouses.
The story that quickly develops follows Addie and her neighbor Louis. That initial “and” is a modestly brilliant touch, an assumption that we’re already involved in the lives of these people, already waiting for the next - and, alas, last - installment about Holt, Colo. The novel opens with a sentence as simple as a line from the Gospels: “And then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters.” Such posthumous publications come trailing clouds of skepticism, but “Our Souls at Night” is such a tender, carefully polished work that it seems like a blessing we had no right to expect. In his obituary, there was mention of a manuscript he’d completed just before dying, and now we have a chance to read that final book. We expect writers to be something between Hollywood starlet and a village idiot.”īy the time he died last November at the age of 71, he had successfully avoided either of those fates and published five quiet, beloved novels about the people of Holt, Colo., a fictional town drawn from his itinerant adolescence. Afterward, he told the New York Times, “We’re nuts, crazy in this country about fame. The book was a bestseller for months and a finalist for the National Book Award, which meant he had to dress up for the ceremony in New York and wear a medal on a ribbon around his neck and feel genuinely uncomfortable. His popularity swelled quickly, though, when he published his third novel, “Plainsong,” in 1999 at the age of 56. Readers took their time finding Kent Haruf, but he was a patient man who didn’t care much for the trappings of fame anyhow.
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