Plainsong

by Kent Haruf

Hardcover, 2000

Call number

FIC HAR

Publication

Knopf (2000), Edition: 9th

Description

Fiction. Literature. HTML:National Book Award Finalist A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver. In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl�??her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house�??is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known. From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together�??their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American t… (more)

Subjects

City and town life Fiction

Colorado Fiction

Domestic fiction

User reviews

LibraryThing member TadAD

Spare. Rich. Elegant. Quiet. Lovely. Never mind that some of those adjectives seem to contradict each other. So many books want to show you a slice of life; this one succeeds. Haruf may not have written a revolutionary novel, but it is a deeply good and satisfying one.

This is one of those books

that has themes — isolation, community, decency — without being about the themes. Instead, it is about the characters who, with perhaps one exception, seem lifted from everyday life. When you try to tell the story, they seem archetypical, maybe even trite: the pregnant teenager cast out by her mother, the kind-hearted teacher, the crotchety but kind old men. But it is Haruf's talent that they do not read that way. Instead of having that artificiality...instead of seeming fabricated solely for the purposes of build up through denouement...it felt like they had existed before the story ever started and had lives that went on long after the final page was done.

Very little happens in Plainsong. Very little gets resolved in Plainsong. But the word that keeps coming to mind is resonant. It's a word that I think is horribly overused when talking about books but, in this case, seems appropriate to me.

Perhaps the simplest way to express my feelings is that, upon finishing, I immediately ordered Eventide.

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LibraryThing member DeltaQueen50

I have just finished the spell bounding Plainsong by Kent Haruf and I don’t believe that I can write anything about this book that will do it justice. In the setting of a small rural Colorado town, the author tears back the layers to reveal the inner lives of various residents and in doing so

shows us how valuable and needed family ties are, but also, and more importantly, that these family ties need not be connected by blood.

Heartstrings are truly pulled when lonely, isolated pregnant teenager, Victoria, is assisted by her teacher and put together with the older, crusty bachelor McPheron brothers. We can see the healing begin and a sense of family start to bud. We also read of the Guthrie family, high school teacher Tom and his two small sons, Ike and Bobby abandoned by their mother, learning to bond together to create a family that is secure and safe. Woven throughout the story are such wonderful, true to life characters such as Iva Stearns whom the boys at first fear but grow to rely on for comfort and conversation, and strong, confident Maggie Jones, another teacher, she looks beyond the surface of people and seems to know what they need even before they do themselves. Of course, not all the residents of this town are kind and thoughtful, just like real life, there those who are selfish and do more harm than good to others.

The author weaves his story around these struggling characters who learn to reach out and help one another. The story never crosses the line into becoming too emotional or overdone, the author’s writing is candid, under embellished and quite beautiful. I found Plainsong to be an uplifting experience, a simple, straight forward story that speaks to the heart.

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LibraryThing member lit_chick

“They set out in the bright cold day, riding in the pickup, the girl seated in the middle between them with a blanket over her lap, with the old papers and sales receipts and fencing pliers and the hot wire testers and the dirty coffee mugs all sliding back and forth across the dashboard whenever

they made any sharp turn, driving north toward Holt …” (178)

Plainsong is one of those rare gems that comes along unexpectedly and immediately connects, refusing to be put down. Sparely written, rich, and exquisite, it is evocative of the humanity which unites us – flawed but ultimately decent.

In Holt, Colorado, high school teacher, Tom Guthrie, lives with his young sons Ike and Bobby. His wife and the children’s mother has retreated from her family, isolating herself in a darkened spare room before finally leaving for Denver. Victoria Roubideaux, a pregnant teenager, has been banished her from home by her mother – perhaps as a punishment to her absent father. Maggie Jones, another of Holt’s high school teachers, takes Victoria in for a time; but her aging and demented father prevents the arrangement from being more than temporary. Unexpectedly, the teen will find home with the elderly McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, bachelor, gentlemen farmers. Haruf’s characters, relatable and unremarkable in and of themselves, are richer for their relationships with one another. And we are reminded that the notion of family is not limited to blood ties – sometimes, it is much, much more.

Haruf is a new favourite author for me! Those who appreciate spare, quiet prose and a story driven by characters and setting will enjoy Plainsong – think Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin. Most highly recommended!

“… the country flat and whitepatched with snow and the wheat stubble and the cornstalks sticking up blackly out of the frozen ground and the winter wheat showing in the fall-planted fields as green as jewelry. Once they saw a lone coyote in the open, running, a steady distance-covering lope, its long tail floating out behind like a trail of smoke. Then it spotted the pickup, stopped, started to move again, running hard now ..." (178)

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LibraryThing member Meredy

Six-word review: Caring about others makes people beautiful.

Extended review:

A young girl, pregnant, alone. Two curious young boys and their father, deserted by their depressed mother. A couple of old bachelor farmers who know cattle better than people. A woman who knows all of them.

Ordinary

people, ordinary lives in a small town in the high plains of Colorado, working as they must, coping with loss, enjoying their small pleasures, doing their best. Loving what and whom they love, and dealing with trouble as squarely and pragmatically as they can.

In place of an epigraph between the title page and the half title page, we see this:

Plainsong--the unisonous vocal music used in the Christian church from the earliest times; any simple and unadorned melody or air.

The language is spare but unsparing. We see and feel with the characters as they face life, love, and death. There are experiences here that we haven't seen elsewhere, and they feel as real as memories.

One of the beauties of this book is that the heroine, if there is one at all, never steps into the foreground. She's just there, quietly doing what her heart tells her, making a difference. She rarely comes into full focus. And yet her role is crucial. I like how the author handled that, without fanfare. I also like his handling of the antagonist, without the contrived solutions of a conventional dramatic arc.

This book is a simple and unadorned melody set in the Great Plains of the western U.S., and, like the characters mirrored here, deeper and more complex than it appears on the surface.

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LibraryThing member lauralkeet

Why did it take me so long to get my hands on this book? I actually think I had it confused with another title, until some recent LibraryThing "buzz" caused me to take a closer look. And it was brilliant.

Plainsong is about the lives of ordinary people living in fictional Holt County, Colorado. Each

short chapter focuses on one of the central characters, which include high school teacher Tom Guthrie, Tom's young sons Ike & Bobby, 17-year-old Victoria Robideaux, and the cattle-farming McPheron brothers. Everyone is dealing with the cards life has dealt them, both good and bad, and everyone seems to have a burden to carry, alone. But gradually, their lives intersect, those burdens become shared, and the world is a better place as a result.

Others have compared Kent Haruf's writing to Marilynne Robinson (author of Gilead and Home), whose work I also love. Both authors have a way of immersing the reader in a slow, quiet story with surprising emotional impact. And Haruf's setting and characterizations are marvelous. I could picture the town, and feel the cold winter wind whipping across the prairie. My heart went out to characters dealing with troublesome life events, and I wanted to hug the McPheron brothers as their lives became richer by caring for others. I'm glad there are two more books in this series, because I'd be happy to sit a spell in Holt County.

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LibraryThing member AlisonY

I may just have fallen in love with a new author... A beautiful, pared back and emotional read, I thought this was a fantastic book, executed with a quiet brilliance that pulls hard on the heartstrings.

Set in Holt, Colarado, two main stories are interwoven throughout the novel; Tom Guthrie, a

teacher and father of two good kids, is struggling with the breakdown of his marriage and some problems at school, whilst the boys are increasingly lonely and missing the security of a stable home life. At the same school, a young student Victoria Roubideaux finds herself pregnant and cast adrift, reliant on the kindness and generosity of another school teacher and two farming brothers to help her build a plan for a new life.

This novel has a simple plot of everyday hardship, but Haruf's plainspoken and unsentimental prose builds an outstanding story of emotional tension, developing multifaceted characters that you sympathise with, worry about, get angry with, and plain just fall in love with. If they were all in front of me now I'd have to gather them all together for a major group hug before settling them down for a few beers and a barbecue.

Perfect is a pretty strong word to use, but try as I might I really can't find too much wrong with this novel.

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LibraryThing member laytonwoman3rd

As simple and beautiful as its title would imply, this is the uncomplicated story of several quite ordinary, utterly real and oddly engaging people as they meet what life deals out over the course of a little less than a year. We come into their lives in the middle, and very little back story is

revealed. Tom Guthrie is a high school history teacher whose wife seems to have sunk into depression and ultimately leaves him and their two little boys to live with her sister in Denver. We don't know why. Victoria Robideaux is 17, and pregnant. When her bitter miserable mother discovers her condition, she locks Victoria out of the house. Another high school teacher, Maggie Jones, takes her in, and eventually arranges for her to lodge with two old brothers on their small farm (one thinks inevitably of Garrison Keillor's Norwegian bachelor farmers). There is not an earth-shattering event in this novel, and the drama, even in the tensest moments, is low-key. So is the humor. As a girl who grew up in small towns and spent a lot of time on small farms, I settled right into this world (doesn't matter at all that this story is set in Colorado, and my places are in Pennsylvania and New York), as easily as I would slip into the kitchens and barnyards of my youth. Without preaching, Haruf shows us people for whom doing Right is the natural way of things, even when the odds seem to be against that way working out. These are not Goody-Two-Shoes people; just Good people. When bad stuff happens, they face it head on, and hope for the best. If you're inclined to cynicism, a chorus of Plainsong might be just the tonic you need.

Review written May 2014

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LibraryThing member katiekrug

I first heard of this novel on LT way back when, and I'm not sure why I waited so long to read it. I knew I would love it - in fact, I collected hardcovers of all three books in the trilogy because I knew it would be just my thing. And the first volume did not disappoint. It follows several

denizens of Holt, a small town on the eastern plains of Colorado. Nothing hugely momentous happens, but the various perspectives give us a complete picture of life and struggle in a small town. Haruf treats his characters with such respect, imbuing them with dignity and worth, that one understands the inherent value of the Everyman, not the larger-than-life Doer of Great Deeds, but the average person trying to achieve nothing more than a good life. There is conflict and death and ugliness, but what stands out more are the tenderness and quiet moments that constitute the best parts of life.

A lovely, gentle novel with unforgettable characters.

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LibraryThing member kambrogi

When I finished this book, I turned the volume over in my hands and stroked the cover, smiling. I do that sometimes if a book is really, really good. I don’t want to let it go right away, even though I’ve read the last word.

This is a nearly perfect literary novel. It is a story of

rural/small-town American life that focuses on a few characters whose experiences gradually begin to overlap. You will meet the young boys who see their mother slipping away, the school teacher whose struggles with a student threaten his family, the elderly farmer brothers who take in a stray, and the young woman whose mother turns her out after a bad decision. The weaver of all these plot threads is Maggie, a woman with a gift for bringing people together. Not every character triumphs, but many find a way to survive through the generosity of others.

Haruf has done what many others may fail to do: show human decency without sentimentality or dishonesty, in language that is as simple as it is dazzling. Don’t miss it.

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LibraryThing member ctpress

"Plainsong" is the first in a trilogy all set in the fictionalized town of Holt, Colorado. I’ve already read the third "Benediction".

We follow several stories that are vaguely connected. A schoolteacher having trouble with a bad boy in school. The teacher’s two young sons who experience the

loss of their mother who have moved away because of a depression. A teenager who becomes pregnant - and find new hope staying with two elderly bachelor farmers.

That doesn’t sound very exciting or special - I know. But it’s the way Haruf “magically” with his sparse prose creates a very realistic tone - sometimes suspenseful and tragic, other times hopeful and funny. Not a sentence in this novel seems superfluous or out of place.

Tom Stechschulte narration in deep bass does a good job creating this special atmosphere. Specially his voice for the lovely grounded McPheron-brothers - providing us with most of the uplifting scenes in the book.

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LibraryThing member stillatim

I don't often rank things according to goodreads 'hate, dislike, okay, like, really like' scale. I think books should be rated as good or bad; sue me. But this one... this one I couldn't resist. I liked it, okay? Yes, it's simplistic, goodies and baddies are signposted more effectively than in your

average Captain America strip. Yes, it's kind of a morality tale. Yes, it borders on the hopelessly romantic. Yes, there are more analogies in the first chapter than I would usually allow in any roman a fleuve, let alone single volume novel. Yes, it reads kind of like Cormac McCarthy if he was really happy and content, and honestly? That's really freaking weird.

But... sometimes you just want to read something that's nicely written, that suggests there's a reason to have faith in anything, that aims for easily comprehensible structure and prose rather than whatever the most recent literary theory might be. This book is Friday Night Lights without football, with the same simple yet believable claim: hell is only other people when you're already hellbound. People will still read this long after all the tricky theory stuff has been out of print for years. That's not an unquestionable good, but I suspect it's a fact.

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LibraryThing member ejj1955

Wow. I've just finished this book and part of me wants to let it sit in my mind for a while as I figure out what it is about it that is so powerful. It is a simple story, simply told, of ordinary people in a small town in the windswept Great Plains. The time in which it is set is never explicitly

stated, but it's most likely the mid-1970s. A teacher's wife leaves him with their two sons; a high-school girl gets pregnant and, when thrown out by her mother, finds a new home; two brothers, farmers, find that they can change to help someone in need.

At first I was annoyed by the lack of quotation marks around the dialog, but, on the one hand, I don't think there's anywhere in the book that this is confusing, and, on the other, I began to see that as a deliberate device to reinforce the theme of the title. The language is plain and yet completely believable, as are the little touches--what the young boys do with their time or the socializing at the American Legion hall on a Friday or Saturday night. When a man spends the night with a woman, everyone in town knows about it--as one character points out, did the man not realize everyone knew his truck?

The story ends gently, without any startling revelations or violent upheavals, but it's satisfying as it is. There's apparently a sequel, though, and I'm not sure if I want to read it--knowing that change will bring pain to some of the people I've come to care about. But I may not be able to resist revisiting this world.

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LibraryThing member rmckeown

About a year and a half ago, I reviewed the splendid and tender novel, Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf. While on a reconnaissance mission to new and independent books stores in Florida, I came across four of his six novels. The owner of the shop happened to be there and we talked about some

authors she liked, and when she mentioned Haruf, I swept up the four missing works. We will be spending a lot of time with the novels of the departed Kent Haruf over the next year.

I began with Plainsong, which now comes to you highly recommended. Haruf provided an epitaph to the novel with this definition, “Plainsong—the unisonous vocal music used in the Christian church from the earliest times; and simple and unadorned melody or air.” Plainsong is a perfect title for a perfect novel.

The story revolves around history teacher Tom Guthrie and his two young sons, Ike and Bobby; Victoria Robideaux, a teenager thrown out of her home by her mother; Maggie Jones is a colleague of Tom’s, and she decides to help Victoria; two bachelor ranchers, Raymond and Harold, who take Victoria into their home, and Ella, Tom’s wife, who suffers some psychological problems; and finally, the town of Holt itself. All these characters live quiet lives trying to survive, while trying to bring others along with them.

Ella is living separately from Tom and the boys. She decides to move to Denver to live with her sister. Tom brings the boys for a visit with Ella before she leaves. Haruf writes, [Ike and Bobby] climbed out of the pickup and walked one after the other up the sidewalk and knocked on the door and stood waiting without turning to look back at him, and then she opened the front door. She had changed clothes since the afternoon and now she was wearing a handsome blue dress. [Tom] thought she looked slim and pretty framed in the doorway. She let them in and closed the door, and afterwards he drove up Chicago Avenue past the little houses set back from the street in their narrow lots, the lawns in front of them all brown with winter and the evening lights turned on inside the houses and people sitting down to dinner in the kitchens or watching the news on television in the front rooms, while in some of the houses some of the people too, he knew well, were already starting to argue in the back bedrooms” (118-119).

Ike and Bobby visit an elderly woman to collect the weekly newspaper money. She intimidated the boys a bit, but they were polite. On one such visit, Haruf wrote, “She shuffled into the next room and came back carrying a flat and ragged cardboard box, and set it on the table and removed the lid, then she showed them photographs that had been much-handled in the long afternoons and evenings of her solitary life, photpgraphs that had been lifted out and examined and returned to the black picture book album, the album itself of an old shape and style. They were all of her son, Albert. That’s him, she told them. Her tobacco-stained finger pointed at one of the photographs. That’s my son. He died in the war. In the Pacific” (149-150). I once ran errands for an elderly woman who was bed ridden. She chain-smoked as dug in her purse for a quarter.

This story won’t make you cry. It is the “comfort food” of reading. Like the epithet, steady good people live their lives trying to help one another any way they can. I can’t help being reminded of Thoreau’s note that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.” I had a tough time putting this novel down when the door bell rang, or when I was called to dinner. It is a quiet read for quiet times. Plainsong by Kent Haruf is a novel you won’t soon forget. 5 stars.

--Jim, 1/2/17

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LibraryThing member Monkeypats

The book is exactly as the title describes - plain, but beautiful. Kent Haruf paints a picture of people you come to believe could be real. His writing provides a beautiful story that lets you determine the meaning for yourself, without forcing his own deeper meanings or philosophy blatantly upon

you. A simple story and a great read - highly recommended!!

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LibraryThing member juniperSun

Plainsong is plainly written. Haruf describes what people do, the surroundings, what is said--mostly not much. Most of the time people seem to be pondering things we are not informed of. Emotions are never mentioned.
Obviously the sparse dry prose is intended to convey the essence of this sparse dry

land, a metaphor for their sparse lives. I'm from the rural Midwest & can picture the old farmers rubbing their worn hands, but here we also have leaves rustling, streams sparkling, and ups and downs of the land.

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LibraryThing member LisaMaria_C

Hated this sooo much and didn't get far in. The book rotates between Guthrie, a teacher; his two young sons Ike and Bobby; a pregnant teen Victoria and two elderly bachelor brothers, the McPherons, in small town Holt, Colorado.

The author writes the dialogue without quotation marks. Now, believe it

or not, I love it when authors play with style and interweaving narratives. I loved Chaon's Await Your Reply with seeming unconnected narrative strands that eventually come together. I just finished Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and loved how it used its style to tell its story--it's quirky structure and syntax had a purpose. I felt the same about McInerney Bright Lights, Big City, a novel told entirely in second person. I have a friend who is a writer and loves that point of view because she says it is a great way to convey a damaged character.

In this case, I couldn't see any purpose to omitting quotation marks except raising a flag that says "See, I'm a genius! See how iconoclastic I am!" Eccentric styles like this one can be bearable in a short poem or story but a novel of this length? One so otherwise dull and plodding? What I saw was something that was a pain to read without enough payoff--so I stopped about a third way through.

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LibraryThing member HaroldTitus

I loved this book’s humanity, its characters, and the author’s craft.

This is a story about kindness and decency triumphing over selfishness and cruelty. This is not a story about characters placed in exceptional situations like in wars or battles but about ordinary people with real-life

difficulties exhibiting attributes or defects of character with which readers readily identify.

Plainsong takes place in a small-town rural Colorado community probably in the 1960s. Tom Guthrie is an American history teacher with eight and nine-year-old sons to raise. He and his mentally ill wife are estranged. Victoria Roubideaux is a pregnant seventeen-year-old high school student whose mother has banished her from their house. Harold and Raymond McPheron are two aged bachelor cow farmers who are asked by Maggie Jones, a sympathetic teacher at the high school, to take Victoria in. Russell Beckman is a selfish, nasty, indolent student in one of Guthrie’s classes. He and his vicious parents cause Guthrie considerable grief. Complicating Victoria’s life is the young man who has gotten her pregnant. Over the course of nine months the lives of these characters change, for better or worse, realistically, inexorably.

Kent Haruf writes beautifully. He places his characters in particular situations and, using third-person narration, tells their stories revealing only their conversations and their actions. He rarely interjects their thoughts. We, the readers, are left to hear and witness and judge these characters as we do actual people. Part of the appeal of this book is the not-immediately-knowing and, consequently, the craving to know why specific characters are in the situations we find them in so that we can project what they might do to rectify them.

I especially enjoyed the author’s terse dialogue and frequent use of sensory detail. You will read no empty dialogue here. What each character says is to the point and fits. Haruf has an excellent eye for sensory detail. He makes use of it without being ostentatious. What he uses goes beyond what we writers more often than not just make up. Here is an example:

“Guthrie ordered a beer and Monroe drew it and set it down in front of him. He wiped at a spot on the polished wood but it was something in the grain of the wood itself.”

The setting of the novel is as authentic as the characters and their conflicts. The school has the feel that I knew as a public school teacher. The activities of the McPheron brothers working their cow farm were detailed and instructive.

If you are looking for affirmation that goodness can overcome the meanness of life, if you care about people, you will enjoy this book.

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LibraryThing member Limelite

In the town of Holt, CO, there is nothing much but the kind hearts and gentle souls of good people, enough to battle the few brutal and cruel natives and strangers who come to town.

Guthrie is a high school teacher whose wife leaves him first emotionally then physically. He’s raising two boys, Ike

and Bobby, who are victimized by the bully their father is trying to master at school. Victoria Robideaux is a senior and pregnant by an out-of-towner who has left her. When her mother locks her out of the house she turns to Maggie Jones, a kindly neighbor who looks after her at first in her own home until her Alzheimer-cursed father makes that impossible, and then by talking her to the Messers McPherons, bachelor ranchers. Here Victoria stays and lives begin to change as a village becomes a family.

Beautifully told in spare, straightforward prose, the action tells the story of character and reveals that isolation and loneliness are not always man’s fate when compassion and adaptation to each other's needs exists. This is a sentimental story told in an unsentimental way. Foresquare, yet delicately done.

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LibraryThing member herschelian

Stunning, stunning writing. Why on earth is Kent Haruf not better known? This is one of the most evocative, beautifully written books I have ever read. You can hear the voices of the characters in your head - so real, so true. I have just discovered that there are two other books which are loosely

allied with this, I can't wait to read them. Do yourselves a favour, read this book!!

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LibraryThing member porch_reader

Plainsong tells the story of life in the small town of Holt, Colorado. I grew up in a small town and live in one currently. I'm fascinated by small town life, but I'm also very critical of books that don't get it quite right. Haruf gets it right. He tells the story from multiple perspectives, a

high school teacher, his two sons, two bachelor farmers, and a pregnant high school student, to name a few. The storylines interweave and create a tapestry of small town life. The characters don't always make good decisions. They are not always likeable. But they are real. And there is the spark of hope and goodness that underlies even challenging situations. My favorite chapter was the one in which the two bachelor farmers take the pregnant high school student (who they've taken in) shopping for a crib. I was grinning through the whole thing.

This is a special book, told by someone who knows small towns and their residents, who understands their problems, but who sees the good deep inside.

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LibraryThing member infjsarah

This was a reading group book and at least it was short. I did finish it but if it hadn't been short I would not have done so. It's just really not my thing - pretty dull most of the time. I was interested to find out what happened to the girl and the farmer brothers but that was all.

LibraryThing member Sarah_Beaudette

This style of prose is often called spare, and compared to Hemingway. It's true you'll find no florid monologues, no frilly analogies, and little hemming and hawing in the thoughts and words of these plain, hard-working people. But I wouldn't call the prose spare and I wouldn't compare it to

Hemingway.

While emotions run deep in Haruf's prose as in Hemingway's, Plainsong deals with recovery, redemption, and kindness rather than the themes of violence, loss, and human damage that underscore many of Hemingway's novels. There is plenty of cruelty and pain in Plainsong: a pregnant teenager is abandoned by her mother and her baby's father, a mother of two young boys is crippled by depression and incapable of mothering, a teacher is bullied and threatened for failing a slacker who deserves to fail. Yet each narrative of loss has an upward trajectory, wounds slowly healed rather than opened and re-opened. My only bone of contention with this beautiful, under-stated novel is that the characters weren't tested nearly enough. Their problems resolved too easily. They were strong enough to survive greater strife, with consequently greater triumph. Haruf could use a dash more Hemingway and still avoid "depressing" by a long shot.

Like the narrative, the prose is less spartan than it appears on the surface. It's precise. Each description, thought, and especially each dialogue sequence, is erected carefully without seeming careful, a bone fitted and flowing into the skeleton of an elegant house, inviting the reader to inhabit the vivid spaces between the bones, spaces in which Holt County lives and breathes. The hard glint to Haruf's words adds to a sense of bounty, not paucity.

"They were dumbfounded. They looked at her, regarding her as if she might be dangerous. Then they peered into the palms of their thick callused hands spread out before them on the kitchen table and lastly they looked out the window toward the leafless and stunted elm trees.

Oh, I know it sounds crazy, she said. I suppose it is crazy. I don't know. I don't even care. But that girl needs somebody and I'm ready to take desperate measures. She needs a home for these months. And you-she smiled at them-you old solitary bastards need somebody too. Somebody or something besides an old red cow to care about and worry over. It's too lonesome out here. Well, look at you. You're going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not the right kind anyway.

...So for a while they stood below the windmill in the failing light. The thirsty horses approached and sniffed at the water and began to drink, sucking up long draughts of it. Afterward they stood back watching the two brothers, their eyes as large and luminous as perfect round knobs of mahogany glass. It was almost dark now. Only a thin violet band of light showed in the west on the low horizon.

All right, Harold said. I know what I think. What do you think we do with her?

We take her in, Raymond said. He spoke without hesitation, as though he'd only been waiting for his brother to start so they could have this out and settle it."

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LibraryThing member Sarah_Beaudette

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LibraryThing member almin

Beautiful story without a defined plot, but there was no need for one as the characters are enough. The writing is simple, with no quotation marks, but done so perfectly I didn't notice. The McPheron brothers, how can you not love them?

LibraryThing member LukeS

This is Kent Haruf's justifiably praised story of the McPheron brothers' involvement in helping young woman and her baby. It's been about four years since I read it, but Haruf's foursquare language, his evocations of the eastern plains of Colorado, his beguiling depiction of the two ranching

brothers and their impulse to help their deserving neighbors.

"Plainsong" led to the sequel "Eventide," but is superior. The cast of characters, the events, and the ranchers' activities all hit the bulls eye in "Plainsong" but slightly miss the mark in "Eventide."

Read "Plainsong." It will come back to you in sweet memories of conversation, scenes, relationships, and tablaux. I definitely recommend it.

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