"When he turned again to the bed he saw by the change in their faces that they were awake now. This is where you are.''Īnd that is where ''Plainsong'' does its business, in the immediate swoop of time between early fall, when Victoria realizes she is pregnant, and late spring of the following year. Victoria asks if there isn't a woman doctor she can go to: Maggie Jones, who takes Victoria in for a few days, explains that since Victoria wants to keep the baby she will Mother locks her daughter out, she does so in uninterpreted vengeance on Victoria's absent father. When ''Plainsong'' begins, Guthrie's wife,Įlla, lies disturbed, disrupted, in the guest bedroom, as she has for weeks, perhaps months, caught in a kind of nervous anomie for which there is no explanation - none, finally, being needed. But the prose and the outlook are always Haruf's own.Īs he works, Haruf is willing to suggest faint portents of what lies ahead, ''something unaccountable pending in the air,'' but he will not reach back into the past. At times, a sentence almost suggests Flannery O'Connor, if she had got some dry wind into her lungs and a glimpse of open country where To have called them into being at all implies profound acceptance. Nothing could be less like ''Plainsong.'' Haruf allows himself no irony - and yet forsakes no humor - because he never withdraws from these characters or the country they The pervading minimalist silence is one of contempt, of irony at the very least, an embellishment of the Minimalism has often been something of an emotional stunt, a withdrawal, a coyness on the part of the narrator. But it's important not to mistake the plainness of this narrative for the minimalism that has become a long-familiar strain in American fiction. The title clearly alludes to these unadorned lives and to the unadorned manner of Haruf's storytelling. Holt are the world of ''Plainsong.'' It's an imperfect world where things simply are as they are, their beauty and their ugliness depending on just that fact. This man Guthrie his two young boys, Ike and Bobby Ī pregnant teen-ager named Victoria Roubideaux, shut out of her home by her mother the old unmarried McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, who take her in - these and a woman named Maggie Jones and the small town of Of Denver almost to the place where Nebraska and Kansas meet, Haruf has made a novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader.
Yet from simple strands of language and cuttings of talk, from the look of the high Colorado plains east Kent Haruf's novel describes a season of changes great and small in a Colorado plains town.Įre was this man Tom Guthrie.'' That's how Kent Haruf begins the first sentence of his new novel, ''Plainsong,''Īnd not until the last sentence, roughly 300 pages later, does he allow himself a rhetorical flourish so pronounced.
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