Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

About eight years ago I read "Plainsong" and I was thunderstruck. It was so good I immediately turned to "Eventide", which was almost as powerful and affecting. I eagerly went on to one of Haruf's earlier novels, "Where You Once Belonged", but it was merely average and I figured that I had reached the end of the road with Kent Haruf. But from beyond the grave (he died last November) Haruf reaches out with OUR SOULS AT NIGHT. This valedictory novel is on the same elevated plane as "Plainsong" and "Eventide". Three exceptional novels is quite a legacy. As with his earlier novels, OUR SOULS AT NIGHT is set on the plains of eastern Colorado, in the town of Holt. The model for Holt probably is Yuma, Colorado, but in truth it is a town like many others on the High Plains. Small and rather insular, rural, everyone knows everyone else's business, conservative in politics and religion, a populace that outsiders and especially liberal urbanites might dismiss as small-minded, but with many hard-working folk, a handful of misfits, and a surprising number of basically decent, wise, but unprepossessing souls. Addie Moore and Louis Waters fall into that last category. Addie is seventy and has lived in Holt for forty-four years; she has been a widow for some time. Louis, about the same age and a widower, grew up in Holt, went away to college and to start a career, and then came back forty-six years ago. Their houses are only a block apart, but they had not known each other well. One evening Addie shows up at Louis's door and asks to talk to him. 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. So begins a late-in-life love affair between two souls who had resigned themselves to living out the remainder of their days rather lonely. Louis maintains his house but in the evenings he walks down the street to Addie's and the next morning he walks home again. The relationship expands, even -- after a few months -- to sex. The arrangement scandalizes some, but Louis and Addie don't care. Their children do, however, especially Addie's son Gene. And there's the rub. As trite as it might sound, OUR SOULS AT NIGHT is a beautiful story. It is not sensational, it is not edgy, it is not cynical, nor is it freighted with irony like so much modern literature. What it is, is honest. Haruf's prose is pared-down and limpid, maybe even more so than in his earlier novels. OUR SOULS AT NIGHT can be read in a single evening. It you are anything like me, it will be one of your better evenings of reading.