6/21/2023 0 Comments Plainsong novel summary![]() ![]() I don’t think there’s a false word in Kent Haruf’s final novel, Our Souls at Night. One false word can make it all incredible. To ring true, description of even the humblest kind of fulfilment and contentment must be written in awareness of human inadequacy and cruelty and the possibility of illness, ruin, death. That may be because we distrust it, seeing it as sentimentality, confusing the real thing with the fake. ![]() And happiness – not sexual satisfaction, not reward of ambition, not ecstasy, not bliss, just day-to-day happiness – has practically vanished from fiction. ![]() The extraordinary, the thrilling, the transgressive provide automatic glamour, but it takes a brave author to try to describe lives that are so commonplace as not even to be extraordinarily unhappy. W riting about the everyday is a tough job. ![]()
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