Somehow I seem to be reading a lot of books set in the American or Canadian West which truly resonate with me: the works of Richard Wagamese, Peter Heller, and now Kent Haruf’s trilogy: Plainsong, Eventide and Benediction. Plain song, for which Haruf’s Plainsong book is named, is church music without instrumental accompaniment. Haruf’s prose is lean and unadorned, simple and elegant, yet it renders three-dimensional the farm people who populate his story: boys dealing with their parents’ divorce; their father trying to raise two sons on his own while searching for a woman’s love; an elderly woman who bakes the boys cookies; two older men, the McPheron brothers (who remind me of the characters Garth and Walter in the 2003 movie, Secondhand Lions), a pregnant seventeen-year-old kicked out of the house by her mother and taken in by the McPherons. These characters’ lives interweave through the novel like plain song, creating a lovely, powerful whole.
Plainsong is a humble story involving ordinary people living ordinary lives. Though most of the novel is gentle even delicate, there are sharp crescendoes: a disturbing teenaged sex scene as well as a violent attack by directed against the boys by an older teen in retaliation for being failed in American History by the boys’ father. These dark glimpses both increase the stakes and establish a more true reality. Haruf doesn’t retreat from from life’s harsh realities; neither does he sensationalize them. The darker incidents remind us of our worst selves, while the love and redemption here send our souls soaring. I will definitely complete this trilogy.
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Plainsong (Alfred A. Knopf, September 21, 1999) is available through:
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You can read my reviews of similar books here:
Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese
Dream Wheels by Richard Wagamese
Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
The Painter by Peter Heller
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