But always the touch is light, the language understated it’s the vision that is sharp. The ending also raises matters of family obligation and the sacrifices people make that may lead to happiness but equally to hidden sorrow or even anger. Even more interestingly, the somewhat surprising ending lets readers see patterns - and ideas about patterns - that are half-hidden in the early expository chapters and even in the busier more eventful central sections. Similarly, his choice of ordinary or even banal incidents such as Jamie’s reluctance to use the stinky campsite bathroom or Addie grocery shopping with an elderly neighbor suggests the texture of lives as no dramatic incident or lush description ever could.Ĭlearly, then, “Our Souls At Night” celebrates the possibilities of change and growth and happiness even late in life and even after serious sorrows have struck. He deftly shapes his text so that the reader sees epiphanies in everyday occurrences. Such writing can seem almost childlike in its simplicity, but Kent Haruf is never casual.

There were tall fir trees and big ponderosas and aspens along the creek.” The clear icy water with brook trout holed up in the hollows below the rocks. There were Rocky Mountain sheep along the road, all ewes with short sharp horns. The short sentences stretch into lyrical evocation as their lives expand: “They drove up the highway through the Arkansas River canyon, the beautiful fast water, steep red jagged cliffs on each side. It’s clear that both have hard events in their past - traumatic in Addie’s case - but now life is becoming more joyous for both of them. In their nighttime conversations Louis and Addie tell each other how they met their spouses, where they lived, what they worked at and enjoyed. Sorrows are being soothed lives are being built - and not just Jamie’s. He’s nervous without his mother, but Addie and Louis nurture him by reading stories, teaching him to use a catcher’s mitt, even buying him a dog. He has been sent to stay with Addie because his parents’ marriage is coming apart.

Similar passages of serious, almost plodding, description cover the trips Louis and Addie begin to take: to a cafe for lunch, to a softball game with a neighbor, then with Addie’s grandson Jamie to a campsite by a river. He trimmed his fingernails and toenails and at dark went out the back door and walked up the back alley carrying a paper sack with his pajamas and toothbrush inside.” That first night, for example, Louis’ preparations are mundane, but their patient description suggests his anxiety: “He ate a light supper, just a sandwich and a glass of milk, he didn’t want to feel heavy and laden in her bed, and then took a long hot shower and scrubbed himself thoroughly. So begins a relationship whose blossoming is delicately recorded in pellucid language that casts its glow over ordinary objects and daily events, and somehow miraculously captures the bud and bloom of scarcely expressible feelings.

Our souls at night book summary