OUR SOULS AT NIGHT
By Kent Haruf. Picador. $32.99.

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"And then there was the day when Addie Moore made a call on Louis Waters …They lived a block apart on Cedar Street in the oldest part of town."

Plain-spoken American Kent Haruf is best known for the novel Plainsong. He finished this short novel a few months before his death last year.

As usual, Haruf's fictional town is Holt, in Colorado. The town is bound to remark, when the widower Louis accepts the widow Addie's polite request for a (platonic) sleeping companion.

Tell me, talk to me, she pleads. Inevitably, they do talk. Each reveals past disasters and dashed hopes. She lost a daughter, and never had a vocation. He did teaching, but only on the back of a failed poetry career. He regrets hurting a lover "more than I do hurting my wife".

They're not too fazed by the "small-minded pissants" close to home. More challenging are the reactions from their far-flung children. Family troubles send Addie's grandson to Holt for the summer. Rising to the occasion, Louis engages the boy with all-American pastimes.  That only unleashes worse troubles.

If this were a sociology paper, it might be filed under "Elder Abuse". Instead, it offers the tart pleasures of fiction. Human kindness and meanness come and go as they please. Neither is to be underrated. Addie is exactly mindful of her son's malice, but no less mindful of the positive legacy she wants to leave.

Haruf published nothing before he was 40. He once said that too many writers throw in the towel because "it takes so long to learn how to write well". "I felt as though I had a little flame of talent," he also contended, to be kept alight "with care and discipline".

Simple rather than simplistic, illuminating the commonplace with uncommon perspectives, modest Haruf has given himself a fine literary send-off. Our Souls at Night could also be read as an adieu to his wife, Cathy, to whom it is dedicated.

Stephen Saunders is a Canberra reviewer.