Plainsong Kent Haruf

“They wore jeans and boots and canvas chore jackets and caps with flannel earflaps.  At the tip of Harold’s nose a watery drip quivered, then dropped off, while Raymond’s eyes were bleary and red from the cow dust and the cold.”

This is a plain novel – a novel of rural life, the intertwined lives of people who are caught in their own dramas that play out against one another, but do not affect the tilt of the world itself.  These are people who have a reference point in Holt, but Holt could be in any rural landscape, not just the western setting of the novel.

Like life the stories begin before the telling and continue after the conclusion.  People have their personal demons and trials, find wickedness in certain families who think that intimidation is power, and find kindness in people who fill the background of a community portrait.

The writing is excellent, although, I had a difficult time with the choice to not use quotation marks for speech.  Here are a couple examples of the roughhewn descriptions and philosophical musings that are parceled out sparingly, but effectively:

“Well, look at you.  You’re going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life.  Not of the right kind anyway.”

“Out in the winter air it was colder now and the sun was already starting to lean toward the west, while across the street the granite-block courthouse loomed up gray and solid under its green tiled roof.”

“Beside the blacktop there were patches of snow in the fallow fields, drifts and scallops wind-hardened in the ditches.  Black baldy cattle were spread out in the corn stubble, all pointed out of the wind with their heads down, eating steadily.  When she turned off onto the gravel road small birds flew up from the roadside in gusts and blew away in the wind. Along the fence line the snow was brilliant under the sun.”

Perhaps the lesson is that we reflect the landscape of our lives.  We are the place we choose to be and we are surrounded with the plain and common.  This book revels in a mother who conceives to young and unmarried while still in high school, but at the same time contrasts with a mother who slips into her own darkness and abandons her sons and husband.

Two boys grow up in this confusion of losing their mother, seeing their father threatened because he will not pass the town bully and basketball star, find the woman who gives them support dead in her chair, and their lives weave in and out of the other characters of the novel as helpless participants in the broader novel of life itself.

Wikipedia lists the central characters as:

·        Tom Guthrie, a history teacher whose wife is growing more distant and disturbed.

·        Ike and Bobby, Tom's young sons.

·        Victoria Roubideaux, one of Tom's teenage pupils. When Victoria becomes pregnant, her alcoholic mother forces her to leave the house.

·        Raymond and Harold McPheron, bachelor farmers who give Victoria a home and care for her.

·        Maggie Jones, another schoolteacher at the local school who first takes in Victoria, but her dad forces her to kick Victoria out.

But this list misses Mrs Stearns who help give Ike and Bobby a sense of support while they are caught in a whirlwind of events that they cannot understand.  Births – human and animal, deaths – human and animal surround the story and give it the sense that live is just a merry-go-round that we jump off and on and it never stops.

The New York Times called it "a novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader."