Plainsong

Author(s): Kent Haruf

Location

Content

Fictional Holt, Colorado, is the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone’s business before that business even happens. In a way, that’s true of the book, too. There’s not a lot of suspense here, plot wise: you can see each narrative twist and turn coming several miles down the pike. What Plainsong has instead is note-perfect dialogue, surrounded by prose that’s straightforward yet rich in particulars: “a woman walking a white lapdog on a piece of ribbon” glimpsed from a car window: the boys’ mother, her face “as pale as schoolhouse chalk”: the smells of hay and manure, the variations of prairie light. Even the novel’s larger questions are sized to a domestic scale. Will Guthrie find love? Will Victoria run away with the father of her baby? Will the McPherons learn to hold a conversation? But in this case, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and Plainsong manages to capture nothing less than an entire world–fencing pliers, calf-pullers, and all. Kent Haruf has a gorgeous ear, and a knack for rendering the simple complex. –Mary Park

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