53 pages • 1 hour read
Kent HarufOur Souls At Night
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
One night, Addie asks Louis to tell her about his affair. He says the woman’s name was Tamara, and she was an English teacher at his school. She and her husband were having problems, and Diane and Louis were going through a rough patch, too. As the affair went on, Tamara’s husband moved out and Louis moved in with her and her daughter. About two weeks later, Tamara’s husband came over while they were having supper because he missed his family. Louis felt sick with himself because he had left his own daughter to be with Tamara. Soon after, he told Tamara that he was going to end things and move out, and they both cried. He moved back in with Diane and Holly, sleeping on the couch for a while. Diane wasn’t mean or vengeful. That summer, Louis went on a fishing trip with a college friend. When Louis returned home, Diane immediately took him to bed. Tamara had moved to Texas, but she later returned to Holt and called Louis; however, he refused to see her again. Addie accuses Louis of still being in love with Tamara, but Louis claims it’s only the idea of her that appeals to him—the idea of being more than just a mediocre small-town teacher. He regrets that he hurt Diane and Holly, who he fears has learned a bad lesson from this incident about how to behave around men to avoid abandonment. Most of all, he regrets hurting Tamara.
Chapter 11 Summary
Addie recounts the story of how her daughter, Connie, died. Gene was five and Connie was 11, and they were playing in the sprinklers. Gene was chasing Connie around, and then Addie suddenly heard screams and the screech of car tires: Connie had been hit by a car. Addie and Gene rode in the ambulance with her to the hospital. She was unconscious and badly hurt. At around four the next morning, Connie opened her eyes, took some breaths, and died. Gene refused to touch Connie at the funeral and felt responsible for her death. Carl wanted to move to a new house, but Addie refused, saying that the place where her daughter died was now sacred to her. After this, Diane came over a few times to check on Addie, which she appreciated, because other people avoided her, including Louis.
Chapter 12 Summary
Louis calls to tell Addie that he won’t be coming over for a few days because Holly is visiting for Memorial Day Weekend. He thinks Holly has heard about him spending nights at Addie’s.
Chapter 13 Summary
Holly visits Louis and tells him she’s going to Italy for a couple of weeks over the summer for a printmaking class. Then she tells him that Linda Rogers called her and told her about Louis and Addie. Holly thinks it’s embarrassing and that it should stop. Louis tells her that he no longer cares about what other people think and that Holly shouldn’t, either. When he tells Holly that he wishes she would find a responsible man to settle down with, she tells him to let her live her own life. Louis says he asks the same of her. After Holly leaves, she calls Louis to tell him that another person from town, Julie Newcomb, called to inform her of Louis’s affair with Addie. Holly responded by insulting Julie’s husband.
Chapter 14 Summary
Louis talks to Addie about Diane. He says she liked her independence, but she had no interest in getting a job. She would regularly get together with her many friends in town, and she and Holly were very close. Louis and Diane met in college in Fort Collins and married after graduation. Addie says that like Diane, she did not have a career either, though she worked for a while in her husband’s office and in a bank.
Chapter 15 Summary
Thinking about all the rumors about him and Addie circulating in town, Louis proposes that he and Addie walk over together to the Holt Café for lunch on Saturday. They sit in the middle of the café and take their time eating. Three women come over at various points to greet them; one comments that she wishes she could do the same as them, but claims she doesn’t know anyone, would be too scared, and is probably too old. Louis walks Addie home and says he’ll return that night.
Chapter 16 Summary
Addie’s son Gene calls to tell her that his wife has moved to California, leaving him with their son Jamie, who is about to turn six. He doesn’t know if she’s coming back, and to make matters worse, his furniture store is going out of business. He asks if Jamie can stay with Addie for the summer, and she happily agrees. Later, Addie explains to Louis that Gene has always been too controlling, ever since the accident with his sister, and he hates asking people for help. Louis thinks Jamie’s stay means the end of their nightly arrangement, but Addie thinks if they take it slowly, they might be able to continue as before. Gene drops Jamie off, and Addie has Jamie help her bake cupcakes to take his mind off his parents. Then, they take a couple over to Louis and have a brief visit. Addie notices that Jamie seems afraid to be left alone, wanting the light on in the bedroom and the door open. In the middle of the night, he comes to her room to sleep with her.
Chapter 17 Summary
The second night with Jamie goes the same way: In the middle of the night, he wakes up and goes to Addie’s bed, crying. During the day, she shows him the plants in her yard and Carl’s toolbox, but he’s not interested. Louis then invites them over to see a nest of baby mice that he found in his yard, and Jamie is excited. Addie asks if Jamie could help Louis in his garden, so he teaches him how to weed and water the plants. They then go back to Addie’s for lunch. At night, Jamie calls his mother in California and leaves a message for her because she doesn’t answer. He calls his father, too, and speaks with him. Jamie says he wants to come home because he misses his parents. He tells his father about the baby mice, so Gene learns that they were over at Louis’s house. Again, Jamie cries and crawls into Addie’s bed later that night.
Chapter 18 Summary
The next day, Jamie walks over to Louis’s house by himself and asks to see the baby mice. After Jamie helps Louis weed and water, they go back to Addie’s for lunch. She suggests that Louis try staying over that night. When Louis returns at night, he asks what she told Jamie about him coming. Addie says she told the boy that they are good friends who lie down together and talk. They read Jamie a story and say goodnight, but he wakes up screaming later on. Louis carries him into Addie’s bed, and they sleep with Jamie between them.
Chapters 10-18 Analysis
In this set of chapters, Addie’s and Louis’s relationship becomes increasingly close as they begin to confide in each other. Addie’s plan to combat The Pain of Loneliness by spending her nights with Louis is working, since they are beginning to trust one another with painful stories from their pasts and see each other as trustworthy companions. One of Louis’s biggest regrets in life is his affair with Tamara, which hurt his wife and daughter deeply. As a result of this affair, Louis’s reputation in their small town was damaged, and townspeople—like Ruth—still remember his dalliance. He confides in Addie that he and Tamara were acting like they “were people who would just break up marriages and go on like free people. But I couldn’t go on. I was sick of myself” (39). After all this time, Louis still seems to be sick of himself for his past actions. He worries that his daughter, Holly, is still affected by her memories of the affair, and that his wife Diane was disappointed in the way her life turned out, largely because of him. However, he says that when he left Tamara, he felt like he “failed [his] spirit or something. [He] missed some kind of call to be something more than a mediocre high school English teacher in a little dirt-blown town” (42). This reveals that the affair was his bid for freedom from the way his life was turning out; he’d wanted to be a poet, but he was instead a husband and father responsible for his family’s financial security.
Louis’s story about his affair reveals common troubles in many young people’s relationships and marriages: unfaithfulness, financial and parenting pressures, disappointment. He feels comfortable sharing all this with Diane, which indicates their growing closeness; it also points to how different their relationship is from Louis’s marriage. As a young husband, Louis had felt that marriage with Diane was restricting his freedom, he felt resentful toward her that he had to support the family while she didn’t work, and he felt guilty for failing as a parent. However, Addie and Louis, as older people who no longer have these stressors to contend with, find it easier to communicate openly. Late-Life Love comes with the advantage of being simpler and is not complicated by the external factors that young people in relationships usually struggle with.
As Addie and Louis begin confiding in one another, Addie shares that she was deeply pained by the tragedy of her daughter’s death at a young age. Connie’s death left deep scars on the entire Moore family, and Gene, who was just a child at the time, felt responsible for his sister’s death. His refusal to touch Connie’s body at the funeral is an early sign in the novel of how Gene shuts down his emotions. Addie explains to Louis that Gene is “too controlling, too protective” (63), a trait he developed after Connie’s accident. This will prove to be a crucial characteristic later on in the story as Gene asserts his controls over his mother and forbids her from seeing Louis.
In this section of the novel, Louis and Addie realize that news of their relationship has spread, bringing up the theme of Rumors and Reputations. They both deal with the townspeople’s sly comments: Louis with Dorlan Becker, and Addie with a grocery store clerk. Their unusual arrangement is clearly big news in their small town. More important than their neighbors’ opinions, however, is their families’, and Louis has to deal with this, as well. His daughter Holly tells him his relationship is “embarrassing”; some of her friends who still live in town have called her to inform her about her father and Addie, once again showing that the town’s rumor mill has been busy. Louis handles Holly’s criticism well, brushing off his relationship as a good time that is nobody else’s business. He points out that both he and Holly have been too cautious in their relationships, stating, “I never dared anything. I did what I was supposed to. You’ve done too much of that yourself” (52). He is inspired by Addie’s attitude to do what she wants without worrying about other people’s opinions, and he is passing down this wisdom to his daughter, too. Part of Louis’s new daring is when he suggests that he and Addie walk down Main Street “in broad daylight” to have lunch at a popular café (57). The act, essentially a refusal to sneak around, is their outward expression of not being ashamed or embarrassed by how they spend their nights. If people want to criticize them, they will have to “make a public fuss” (59), which Addie thinks is not worth the bother.
By the end of this set of chapters, Louis and Addie have become more comfortable with their arrangement and with others knowing about it. They have shared their most painful memories, drawing them closer. Now Jamie has arrived, disrupting their routine. His presence will require a new way of relating.
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