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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)
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This is one of those books
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.
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.
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)
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
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.
Plainsong is about the lives of ordinary people living in fictional Holt County, Colorado. Each
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.
Set in Holt, Colarado, two main stories are interwoven throughout the novel; Tom Guthrie, a
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.
Review written May 2014
A lovely, gentle novel with unforgettable characters.
This is a nearly perfect literary novel. It is a story of
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Obviously the sparse dry prose is intended to convey the essence of this sparse dry
The author writes the dialogue without quotation marks. Now, believe it
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.
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
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.
Guthrie is a high school teacher whose wife leaves him first emotionally then physically. He’s raising two boys, Ike
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.
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.
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."
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."
"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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813.54 |