MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON by Elizabeth Strout

“There was time, and it was many years ago,” Lucy Barton tells us at the beginning of this slender book, “when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks.” Her room, in New York City with a view of the Chrysler building, becomes a kind of stage set, on which play out gentle soliloquies, memories, conversations, and simple gestures, filling in details of Lucy’s life and the way she thinks about it. Gratitude is a key theme. Looking down from her window at the pedestrians, she “thought how when I got out of the hospital I would never again walk down the sidewalk without giving thanks for being one of those people.”

Three weeks into her stay, she suddenly finds her mother sitting in a chair at the foot of her bed. Lucy’s husband had flown her out from Illinois. “I had not seen my mother for years, and I kept staring at her; I could not figure out why she looked so different.” She stays for five days, telling stories about people they knew, answering or deflecting Lucy’s questions about her childhood. We learn that theirs was one of the poorest families in Amgash, Illinois, looked down on by their neighbors, living above a garage, eating molasses on bread for their supper. Lucy, her sister and brother suffered repeated abuse. “Telling a lie and wasting food were always things to be punished for. Otherwise, on occasion and without warning, my parents—and it was usually my mother and usually in the presence of our father—struck us impulsively and vigorously, as I think some people may have suspected by our splotchy skin and sullen dispositions.”

Of the three siblings, only Lucy was able to escape, propelled into a decent life by her love of books and her good luck in the people and mentors she met along the way. “There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too—unexpected—when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East River, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth …”

One of the mentors who periodically enters the narrative is the writer Sarah Payne. Lucy encounters her by chance in a store, then discovers back at home that she has already read some of her books. Lucy attends a week-long writing workshop that Sarah teaches out in Arizona. There’s a delicious metanarrative as Sarah offers commentary and advice on the drafts that will eventually become the book we’re reading. A profundity, as well. After describing a troubling incident after class, Lucy writes “I think it was the next day that Sarah Payne spoke to us about going to the page with a heart as open as the heart of God.” That generosity of spirit, of forgiveness, of acceptance, is what defines this book.

OUR SOULS AT NIGHT by Kent Haruf

This is Kent Haruf’s last book, written in a burst of urgency following his diagnosis of terminal lung disease. Dedicated to his wife Cathy, and inspired by the rituals of their life, “Our Souls at Night” is a love story about two lonely older people, neighbors, who make a decision to start spending their nights together. Addie is the one who comes up with the idea originally, walking the block over to Louis’s house to make her proposal. “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 … I’m not talking about sex … I’m talking about getting through the night. And lying warm in bed, companionably. Lying down in bed together and you staying the night.”

This is a gentle novel about trying to carve out your own happiness in the face of small-town gossip and resentments, and the ways that adult children, especially the unhappy ones, attempt to selfishly circumscribe the behavior of their aging parents. It’s the eternal question: How do we weigh our loyalty to ourselves against our loyalty to our children?

Like Haruf’s other books, this is set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado. There’s a wonderful, wry bit in a late chapter where Addie and Louis talk about Haruf’s three previous books, without referring to him or the titles by name. Addie asks Louis, speaking of an upcoming theatrical production, “Did you see they’re going to do that last book about Holt County? The one with the old man dying and the preacher.” Their conversation leads inevitably to an exchange in which Addie and Louis seem to momentarily step outside themselves and join the readers, like me, who are taking such pleasure in this gem of a book: “He could write a book about us. How would you like that? I don’t want to be in any book, Louis said. But we’re no more improbable than the story of the two old cattle ranchers … Who would have thought at this time in our lives that we’d still have something like this.”