From The Washington Post:

Kent Haruf’s posthumous novel offers a tender look at love in the twilight

By Ron Charles May 19, 2015 

Readers took their time finding Kent Haruf, but he was a patient man who didn’t care much for the trappings of fame anyhow. His popularity swelled quickly, though, when he published his third novel, “Plainsong,” in 1999 at the age of 56. 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. Afterward, he told the New York Times, “We’re nuts, crazy in this country about fame. We expect writers to be something between Hollywood starlet and a village idiot.”

By 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. 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. 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.

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.”

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 story that quickly develops follows Addie and her neighbor Louis. Both live alone, nursing memories of doleful marriages they stuck with until illness stole away their spouses. Neither has any reason to expect the remaining years will offer relief from the arid rituals of retirement in a small town. Indeed, what older folks are allowed to expect from their lives becomes the central theme of this slim but never slight book.

When Addie knocks on Louis’s door, he knows her only as the widow of a local insurance salesman. He invites her to sit in the living room, and after a few sputtering starts, she make an outlandish proposal: “I’m lonely. I think you might be too. I wonder if you would come and sleep in the night with me.”

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. Decent folk know that old people are supposed to live lives of resolute solitude to protect their dignity (and our inheritance). 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.