Our Souls at Night, by Kent Haruf

Kent Haruf was a gentle, tranquil writer, and his voice is solid in this bittersweet story of last love.

Addie and Louis have lived near one another in Holt, Colorado—on the eastern plains—for years. They have never been close friends, but they have followed each other’s lives peripherally. Both widowed, they’ve lived parallel, but not intersected lives.

Now, Addie, 70, is tired of being alone, especially at night, and she approaches Louis with an offer: that they spend the nights together. This isn’t about sex or romance; it’s about companionship, about being with another person in the night and waking up together. At first, Louis is wary, but then he realizes he, too, needs more human contact.

They talk into the night, wiping away their loneliness, and shrug off any opposition. And from this, a sweet end-of-life love develops.

As the bond between the two grows, Addie’s son and Louis’s daughter are unsure what to make of the relationship and the rest of the town reacts with various levels of acceptance.

Reading Haruf feels like a hug. Here’s Louis talking:

I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark.

Adding to the sweet sorrow of the book is the fact that Haruf wrote it while he knew he was dying—the book was published after his death from lung cancer at 71, around the age of his characters. He knew how it felt to face death close up.

The book is also a Netflix movie starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford, filmed last year in Colorado Springs and Florence, Colorado, where Haruf spent his final years. He was born in my hometown of Pueblo, Colorado and was my age, so we probably met in the maternity ward.—Pat Prijatel

Dear Life, by Alice Munro

Novels have an architecture readers expect. The arc. A beginning, a middle of rising action, a climax of peak intensity, and action falling to a satisfying end.

Many short stories have that same architecture, but Munro’s don’t. Her architecture is like a chocolate covered cherry (messy to eat, rich, with a lingering aftertaste. Not to be eaten by the handful).

Think of the chocolate shell as the narration that swirls around, accessing the thoughts of multiple characters in a single story, and folding back and forth from past to present to past. Think of the creamy cordial inside as the life of southwestern Ontario where Munro lives – forests and lakes, farms, small towns, distances covered by trains, cities. Characters she knew or imagined. Think of the cherry as the treasure – the Ah ha! moment, cradled gently by the cordial and given shape by the chocolate shell.

The Ah ha! moment happens to the reader as it happens to the character. For example, in “Corrie,” the main character, wealthy Corrie Carlton, attends the funeral of a woman, Lillian Wolfe, who worked in the village years ago. Indeed, she worked briefly in the Carlton household and subsequently found a way to blackmail Corrie and her married lover. When Corrie gets trapped into attending Lillian’s funeral reception, she is unsettled by the universal affection in which Lillian is held. The next morning, Corrie wakes up recognizing she has been ensnared for years in the most outrageous lie. As this awful moment of awareness comes to Corrie, a gut feeling of recognition and identification also comes to the reader. (“There’s always one morning when you realize that the birds have all gone. She knows something. She has found it in her sleep.”) And the reader has bitten into the cherry.

Likewise, at the end of “Gravel”, neither the genderless narrator nor the reader knows what really took place that dreadful day when Caro and Blitzee drowned. But Munro has stroked the universal cloudiness of early childhood memories and stirred unease and guilt in the reader.

In these rich, evocative, stories that are as packed with meaning as a novel, Munro revels in the ordinary: her own time and place. She writes about soldiers returning home after World War II (“Train”). She writes about the closing of factories and shifts in the class system (“Pride). She shows us the perfect post-war wife – rigid in housekeeping, wanton in bed (“Haven”). She writes about the sexual revolution and its effect on children (“To Reach Japan”). She writes about drugs, divorce, the fragility of the family, and growing old.

Munro’s characters are never totally worthy. Some are selfish (the mothers in “To Reach Japan” and “Gravel”). Some are exploitative (the gigolo in “Corrie”). Some can’t bond (the narrator in “Train”). Some are irresponsible (Neal in “Gravel”). Munro seems to understand the condition of being broken, and the need to forgive. Even ourselves.

At the end of the last not-quite story, “Dear Life,” Munro confesses guilt for not returning home for her mother’s last illness or funeral. She writes, “We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had a contempt for formal behavior, but why blame it on him? I felt the same. We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.”

These are the closing words in the closing book of a long, distinguished, Nobel Prize winning career. The ten stories and four almost-stories are told as only Munro could tell them. They are a celebration of dear life and an affirmation of our common humanity.   SBM

DEAD WAKE, by Erik Larson

Few tales in history are more haunting or more fraught with secrets than that of the final voyage of the Lusitania, which resulted in one of the most colossal tragedies of maritime history.  Author Erik Larsen ushers us aboard the Lusitania, the fastest ship of its day, on its way from America to England, when on May 7, 1915, it was torpedoed by a German submarine 12 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.  It sank in 18 minutes, 1,198 passengers and crew perished.  Only six of the 22 lifeboats were launched, and many passengers drowned because they donned their life-jackets incorrectly.

Once again, Larson demonstrates his expert researching skills and writing abilities -- switching between the hunter and the hunted, his detailed forensic and utterly engrossing account of the Lusitania’s last voyage, highlights that unpredictable shifts in weather, the many small decisions made by the captains of both the luxury liner and U-Boat, a chance fog, the slowing down to get mail, and numerous other circumstances, all converged to placing the liner in precisely the wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

In Dead Wake, Larson brings to life a cast of evocative characters on board the Lusitania, including the famed Boston bookseller Charles Luriat who come on board with a priceless copy of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, pioneering female architect Theodate Pope, millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt, and art collector Hugh Lane, who carried sealed tubes containing paintings by Rembrandt and Monet. Apart from the Lusitania, Larson also explores that part of the life of President Woodrow Wilson, who was grieving about the death of his wife, but smitten and captivated by the prospect of new love with Edith Galt, and Winston Churchill, then the first Lord of the Admiralty, who hoped to bring America into the war, and whose ultra-secret spy group failed to convey intelligence that might have saved the liner.

This book is excellent when describing the lethal new technology of early submarine warfare, life inside the U-boats, its cramped quarters, “the reek of three dozen men who never bathed”, and the omnipresent danger. Following his government’s new policy of unrestricted warfare, Captain Schweiger fired a single torpedo into the Lusitania’s hull, blowing a hole the size of a house beneath the liner’s waterline.  Less than a minute later, a second explosion shuddered from deep within the bowels of the Lusitania, and she listed precariously and began to sink immediately. 

Unsettling questions clung to the case in the years that followed. Was the ship somehow allowed to sail into a trap? Why had the British Admiralty failed to provide a military escort? What was the cause of the second explosion? Why did Germany then decide to attack civilian shipping? There remains a mystique about the disaster, with questions that remain unresolved, and may never be.

Gripping and important, Dead Wake captures the sheer drama of the disaster.  Put in context of World War 1, the sinking of the Lusitania altered the course of history by ultimately dragging the U.S. into the conflict, although it was two years later.  I agree with one reviewer who suggested that Larson’s book “practically begs Hollywood blockbuster treatment." — Ken Johnson

p.s. After reading Dead Wake, I mistakenly assumed that the U-Boats were the first submarines.  But, with a little research, I found that the first submarine known to have attacked an enemy ship was the Turtle, piloted by Ezra Lee of the American Continental Army.  He piloted the Turtle under a British flagship, attempting to attach an explosive charge to the bottom of the ship.  He was unable to successfully attach it, so was forced to give up the attempt.  But George Washington personally congratulated Lee on his survival and gave him a job in the secret service.

There were a number of other experiments over the next 80+ years, but during the Civil War, submarine development got kicked up a notch. The most well-known Union sub was the USS Alligator, designed by a Frenchman named Brutus de Villeroi, who listed his occupation as “natural genius”.  The Alligator was lost during a storm, before attacking the Confederates.

But the most famous Civil War sub was built by a Horace Hunley, who egotistically named his boat the Hunley. During a test, however, the Confederate sub flooded and five crew members were drowned. It was salvaged though, and on its second attempt, Hunley failed to pull out of a dive and the sub became stuck in the sea floor.  The crew were unable to open the hatches, and Hunley and all his crew perished. Again, it was salvaged and took its first action against the Union, ramming the USS Housatonic with a torpedo protruding from the front of the sub.  After backing away from the Housatonic, the torpedo was charged, sinking the ship within five minutes.  Thus, the Hunley was the first sub ever to sink an enemy ship, securing its place in naval history. —KJ

Last Bus to Wisdom, by Ivan Doig

Ivan Doig’s last book, appropriately titled Last Bus to Wisdom, is an unpredictable and boisterous road novel.  It brought back many memories of my childhood in western Kansas in the same era.

Donal Cameron is a 11-year old being raised by his grandmother on a Montana Ranch in 1951. But when Gram has to have serious surgery, she decides to ship him off to her sister Kate in Manitowoc, Wisconsin for the summer.

On his way to Wisconsin, Donal first rides the Dog Bus, as he calls the Greyhound, wearing his best rodeo shirt. Along the way, he engages with everyone he sits next to, soliciting literary gems for his cherished autograph book, which he carries everywhere. He has a $5 dollar bill in his pocket and three $10 dollar bills pinned to the inside of his shirt, along with two changes of clothes in a battered wicker suitcase.

During the ride, he lives on a steady diet of Mounds candy bars, receives his first real kiss from a good-natured waitress named Letty, and meets Harv, her boyfriend who is on his way back to jail, handcuffed and accompanied by his stepbrother, a mean-spirited sheriff. Other fellow travelers, who he easily interacts with, include young soldiers off to the Korean War, some nuns, a group of obnoxious boys on their way to summer camp who sang “great, green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts”, a song I haven’t heard since I was a kid.

With his shock of red hair, freckles and gift of gab, Donal carries an arrowhead for luck. But, he just escapes being robbed, and missed his transfer in the Twin Cities. With luck from his Arrowhead, however, he was transported by a good Samaritan who drove him to the next bus stop so he could continue on to Wisconsin.

Upon arriving at Aunt Kate’s, he’s let down when he realizes she is not the famous singer Kate Smith, his bedroom is in the attic, she feeds him soggy cereal, and his main entertainment is playing canasta with his aunt’s friends. She is a manipulative presence who abuses her ‘husband’ Herman and condemns Donal to jigsaw puzzles for recreation. Shortly after arriving his loses his pocket money and feels doomed to a summer of endless boredom.

But Donal hits it off with Uncle Herman, a one-eyed German, who is hen-pecked by Kate. Herman routinely escapes to his greenhouse where he reads novels of the old west. During World War II, Herman was an opponent of Hitler, stowed away on a ship to the US, and lived for decades with Kate as an undocumented alien.

After only a month into Donal’s stay, aunt Kate decides to ship him back to Montana, and an uncertain fate awaits him.  But as it turns out, Donal isn’t traveling solo – Herman has decided to fly the coop, cashes his disability check and joins him on the bus, heading for all manners of adventures. Donal asks him where they will go, and Herman says “Anywhere’s." Just so it is “that away," pointing toward the West.

Wearing new cowboy hats they lope all over, getting into scrapes in Yellowstone National Park, seeing pow-wows and rodeos, getting Jack Kerouac’s signature in the autograph book, encountering swindlers, and evading the law. But as posters start to appear announcing that Herman is an enemy alien wanted by the FBI, the pair find themselves on the run. 

After their money is stolen (again), Donal talks a doctor into providing bus fare to Wisdom, Montana.

The story picks up steam in the final pages, where the unlikely pair bunk with hobos arriving for the hay harvest.  Soon, they are adopted into the itinerant clan and obtain haying jobs.  Fortunately, their travails lead to a happy ending.

Doig does a superb job of bringing this bygone era alive for the reader. His richly drawn characters that move the story at a rollicking pace. I truly enjoyed this memorable book.— Ken Johnson

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson

As I write, Arkansas is trying to execute eight men on a calendar of two a day, every other day, for over a week, beginning next Monday, April 17. The state “needs” to kill the men before the medications used in the lethal injections expire. Most of these men have been on death row for over twenty years, and now they are rushed to death because of an expiration date on a drug.

I can hardly bear to think, talk, or read about capital punishment because it feels so fundamentally wrong. So I’m amazed at how Bryan Stevenson could turn a book about death row into truly A Story of Justice and Redemption.

Stevenson is a wonderful storyteller, spotlighting individuals whom he has helped, or tried to help, since he founded the Equal Justice Initiative to defend those often wrongly condemned and trapped in the criminal justice system.

Stevenson gives horrifying numbers for what has happened in that system, to whom it has happened (mainly poor and/or dark skinned people), why it has happened, what it costs – both in terms of dollars and suffering.

He explains where we go wrong when we (with good intentions) personalize victims such as seven year-old Megan Kanka, for whom Megan’s Law is named. He explains the profit motive in incarceration. 

But mainly he shows us people like ourselves, but without affluent white privilege: Walter McMillan, a black man sentenced to die for a murder he patently did not commit; Herbert Richardson, a traumatized young veteran who only meant to scare a pretty young nurse into his arms with a homemade bomb, but killed a child instead; Marsha Colbey, a mother who suffered the sadness of a stillborn child, but was demonized as a murderous parent because she was very poor; and more.

What most impresses me (and puzzled me a little at first) is Stevenson’s calm, steady perseverance: every day he walks into prisons and courthouses where the people in power are not glad to see him. They are not willing to listen, or reconsider, or admit a centimeter of error even in the face of plain and undeniable facts.

How does he keep doing such work day after day, year after year, understaffed and beleaguered by people desperate for his help?

I think his superpower comes from an amazing lack of ego. He never lets the challenges become about him. He kept his focus on others, on their needs. He admits his own brokenness – indeed, he recognizes it as a gateway to grace. And that grace, mingled with intelligence and training, keep him going. 

It sounds so simple, but seems so hard. I’m inspired and instructed and humbled. Just Mercy was a perfect choice for a Lenten read.— Sharelle Moranville

Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance

This book, subtitled A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, is exactly that, a memoir.  Hard to think of a memoir written by someone who was only 31 years old when he wrote it! Vance himself confesses the absurdity of this in his introduction where he writes, “I didn’t write this book because I’ve accomplished something extraordinary.  I wrote this book because I’ve achieved something quite ordinary, which doesn’t happen to most kids who grow up like me.  You see, I grew up poor, in the Rust Belt, in an Ohio steel town that has been hemorrhaging jobs and hope for as long as I can remember.”

And so Vance begins to tell his story. What makes this story compelling is that, while it tells of all the ways in which the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States has left people behind, he is unflinchingly honest about the ways in which many of his people, whom he calls “hillbillies,” have brought about their own demise and their own lack of hope – their lack of care for their children, their sinking into the drug culture, their laziness and lack of any self-awareness.

Vance’s own family has had its difficulties.  As he writes, “I have, to put it mildly, a complex relationship with my parents, one of whom has struggled with addiction for nearly my entire life.”  He himself came close to flunking out of high school: “Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me.  That is the real story of my life, and that is why I wrote this book.  I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it.  I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children.  I want people to understand the American Dream as my family and I encountered it.  I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels.  And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.” 

Vance clearly has a great love for the people about whom he writes, particularly his crazy grandmother and grandfather – and “crazy” is his word, not mine.  This love comes shining through the book even when he sees clearly how the ways in which they act have negative effects on everyone around them. — Jeanie Smith

Run, by Ann Patchett

When I first read Run, I dismissed it as being mediocre, especially by Ann Patchett's standards. But then I kept thinking about it. About the scenes Patchett builds and the characters she creates. When our book club decided to read it, we found much to love about it, much to question, and much to learn. Patchett's standards are, after all, pretty high.

This is a book about how families work and how they don't, about whether we love biological children more or less than adopted. It's about family deception: It starts with a story about a statue of the Virgin Mary that was carved to look like Bernadette's Irish grandmother. It is a flat-out lie—the statue was stolen by her grandfather during a drunken night out—but the family chooses to believe the lie even though they fully know the the truth. The lie, of course, is much lovelier. The mysterious mother figure, Tennessee, is not entirely who she says she is. Father Sullivan is not a saint, and his nephew Sullivan's recent past is a little more murky than he suggests. Doyle tries to manipulate them all and Tip and Teddy do their best to become who they want to be, more or less, although their father's shadow is large and controlling.

Patchett has been criticized for implicit racism in the book—the white family is the ideal, the Black is flawed, and all Black people can run fast. But Kenya is a delightfully authentic little girl and she would clearly choose to be with her mother, in her dark little apartment, surrounded by the love she has always known rather than in the bright and airy Doyle home. Ultimately, she has no choice, and she becomes the family heiress, who inherits the magic statue. The fact that she looks nothing like that version of the Blessed Virgin doesn't even enter into Bernard's decision. So I see a lot of color blindness here, but I can see how that in itself presents a rosy happy-ever-after ending that shrugs off the harsh realities of living with a skin tone a tad too dark to be Irish. — Pat Prijatel