![]() Readers’ comments: Freedom to choose religion is constitutional, but does not include missionaries.Reading list for young readers: The 12 books shortlisted for the 2023 Neev Book Awards.Holt and the people who dwell there always are, which is why Haruf's imagined community - home to people like Addie and Louis Dad and Mary Victoria and the McPheron brothers Tom Guthrie and Maggie Jones - will live on. She's right, as is Louis in pointing to the author's "imagination" as the mysterious force that makes such improbabilities real. "We're no more improbable than the story of the two old cattle ranchers," she continues, referring to Haruf's "Plainsong" (1999). "He could write a book about us," Addie says to Louis. One might ask the same of Haruf and this novel it's no accident that Addie poses her questions within a brief, sly chapter in which she and Louis are discussing the never-named author who constantly writes about their town. And not all dried up in body and spirit." Muses one morning, "that it turns out we're not finished with changes and excitements. As in "Benediction," those new beginnings are underscored by the presence of a young child - here, Addie's 6-year-old grandson, who lives with her for the summer and takes a shine to Louis. Which also means that no matter how old we are, we always have the chance to begin anew. Instead there's the hard-won and often hard-to-accept knowledge that marriages often die because all of us change. There's no blame associated with such observations - not from them and not from Haruf, who is always empathetic toward his characters. What gradually becomes clear is that Addie and Louis evolved in ways their spouses did not. It's always two people bumping against each other blindly, acting out of old ideas and dreams and mistaken understandings." "Who does ever get what they want? It doesn't seem to happen to many of us if any at all. Hence statements like this one from Addie, as she and Louis each admit the various ways in which their long marriages disappointed both themselves and their respective spouses: This leads to remarkably candid conversations and confessions from two people who have seen too much - and are too close to the finish line - to continue lying to themselves or each other. Such pressures will result in an unsatisfying and improbable plot twist toward novel's end, leaving me wondering whether Haruf rounded his novel off before it was truly done.īut before getting there, Addie and Louis' refreshing refusal to worry about appearances extends to the way they approach their own deepening relationship. "I'm not going to live that way anymore."Įasier said than done, particularly when Addie and Louis' grown and tightly wound children are among those urging them to conform. ![]() "I've done that too long - all my life," Addie continues. "I made up my mind I'm not going to pay attention to what people think," Addie says to Louis, who gradually comes around to Addie's way of thinking, despite initial concern about Holt's gossips. Like the 77-year-old Dad - like, perhaps, the dying Haruf - Addie and Louis have reached a point where they'd like to think they care less than they once did about how their behavior goes down within the small town where they live. Set in 2014 in Holt - the small, fictional town on the eastern Colorado plains where most of Haruf's stories unfold - "Our Souls at Night" reads like a coda to "Benediction," which revolves around Dad Lewis, the dying owner of a hardware store looking back over his life. That proposition gets made on the third page of Kent Haruf's "Our Souls at Night," the novel Haruf completed just before dying last November at 71. "I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me." ![]()
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