Plainsong (Vintage Contemporaries)

The landscape of Kent Haruf's Plainsong is flat, sandy, full of wheat and corn, and out in the open country, between the small towns, stands of trees surround lonely farmhouses. This is the same country that was so well portrayed in Willa Cather's novels and masterfully mapped by William Least Heat-Moon in PrairyErth. It is a dry land where the wind pushes what little Winter snow there is from farm to farm and where corn dries up in the Summer sun. It is here that they live, the people of the wonderful novel Plainsong. Victoria Roubideaux is in high school, pregnant but single, Tom Guthrie and his depressed wife are leaving each other, Maggie Jones steps in to rescue Victoria and gets involved with the searching high-school colleague Tom, while Guthrie's two boys get themselves into all kinds of boyish trouble and adventures, and the old McPheron brothers with their cattle and small farm end up taking center stage in the story about Holt, Colorado. Everything in Plainsong is moving at its own pace. People seem to go about their lives in a fashion crafted to play along with the landscape, rather than employing tactics to change the course of a force greater than themselves, and this is summed up well by Maggie Jones as she brings Victoria down to earth to accept what lies ahead of her: "Listen to me. You're here now. This is where you are". But where Cather or Erdrich or McCarthy would have emphasized unbearable struggles, human wickedness, or even pure evil, Kent Haruf seems to believe that people can find whatever kindness is within them and bring that out when society, unborn babies, frail old ladies, and everyone else need it. Now, that may sound rosy, even bordering on romance, and to be honest, Plainsong is far from romantic and very far from rosy. Holt is a community in social recession, and there is a somber tone to many a scene in the book which I can best describe by comparing it to how it feels standing in a brisk Kansas wind on a cloudy day on an absolutely flat expanse. Like Haruf says in another book, the photo essay "West of Last Chance": "It isn't pretty, but it's beautiful". Being a beautiful novel, Plainsong is also at times very funny. I mean, really ha ha funny. But since what makes us laugh depends on personal tastes I'll just quote a passage which I thoroughly enjoyed. It is from a scene where the two old, eccentric McPheron brothers want to cheer up the girl staying at their place, and so decide to buy her a crib for her unborn baby. But they come to a dead end when to question, Where to buy a crib?, arises. And so one of them calls their friend Maggie Jones: "When Maggie picked up the phone Harold said to her, If you was to buy a crib, where would you think to get it? Maggie paused, then she said, This must be one of the McPheron brothers. That's right. The good-looking smart one. Well, Raymond, she said. It's nice of you to call. That's not as comical a you think, Harold said. Isn't it? No, it ain't. Anyhow, what's your answer? Where would you buy a crib if you was to need one? I'm to understand that you don't mean a corn crib. You wouldn't have to ask me about that. That's right. I believe I'd drive over to Phillips. To the department store. They'd have a baby section. Whereabouts is it? On the square across from the courthouse. On the norh side? Yes. Okay, Harold said. How you doing, Maggie? You doing all right? She laughed. I'm doing fine. Thanks for the information, he said. Happy New Year's to you, and hung up." (P. 176-177) While things in Plainsong seem to just happen they do not happen without drama. But drama happens unceremoniously in Plainsong. Fights, flights, deaths, births, love, hate. All extremes of the emotional continuum come into play in the novel, but they're played out so subtly that you easily fall into their slow moving rhythm which seems to acknowledge itself as itself. It is as if the language of the novel accepts fate and never accelerates to keep up with the drama. It seems to know that it is enough to describe the depths of human lives. Actually, the book reminds me of David Lynch's The Straight Story, where the peak of the drama occurs when the brakes on old Alvin Straight's lawnmower fail on a downhill drive, and Alvin is suspended somewhere between life and death for a few seconds. The Straight Story moves at about Plainsong pace throughout the movie, but Alvin's quest and his struggles to mend the relationship to his older brother still managed to get me deeply engaged in his life, just like I did with the lives of people in Plainsong.

To my dismay I had read around one third of the book and I was becoming convinced that I was not going to have very high praise for Plainsong, and, I truly stress about hating a book group book, especially when you know the torment that the BB member went through choosing the perfect book for us to read. I was finding the sentences long and the style very flat and it lacked emotion, I also found the start of the book almost foreboding, I felt a dark undertone that had me on my seat wondering what horrible thing was going to happen, and I really was not looking forward to reading what ever it had waiting for me. Amazingly, and to my relief Plainsong made a shift, I am not sure how Haruf accomplished this but the heaviness lifted. I don't believe the language changed very much but there was a definite change in the rhythm. I am wondering if anyone else experienced this as well? This is where I really started getting hooked. I loved the book. I look for and enjoy character development in a book and this did not have the usual development, instead it created tension with so little apparent effort and the characters were very well developed with so little of everything, wow, a great writing skill. I was totally charmed with the two bachelor brothers. I loved there willingness and expectancy of the situation to bring a young girl into their home. I loved the way they took her shopping for the crib, and then went in to a long discussion of the best and safest to buy. I picked up something interesting towards the end which enlightened me about the writing and that was they called her "the girl". I found the lack of emotion really made the character and the story much more defined and this technique possibly was how the tension in the book was created. You really felt the strain and stress in all the characters. Sadly I don't know enough about writing to dissect the book critically in that way. Plainsong worked so well in defining the sadness' and bad choices that people make in their lives and how it effects people, but also how generous people can be. I had lots of questions that were never answered or even looked like they would be, like what about the mother? she was there then, then not, never to come up again in the novel. The prose were very simple and so where the characters and even their situations, the story just pulled you in and kept you reading. There were no high dramatics it was just about uncomplicated people living expected lives and making themselves available to each other. All the characters showed them selves by what they did, not what they said. This a book that you had to think about, it did not spill it all out I suppose I would say that I found Haruf's writing elegant, although the people and topic were not.

This one really snuck up on me. It took me a couple chapters to get into it, but once I did I finished it in only a couple sittings. One of the few books I can remember that made me laugh out loud on one page, and cry on the next. It's not always tears of sadness, either. There are so many touching acts of simple kindness in this book, that are just as effective. The writing is simple, yet extremely profound and authentic. Characters grief in a real way - not by crying or throwing fits about some tragic event in their life, but by actions that indirectly reflect their specific pain. I've never read a book that approached grief in such a realistic way. The characters are so well written, and have so much depth, I honestly didn't want the book to end. I've already ordered the 2nd and 3rd book in the trilogy, and cannot wait to get my hands on them.

Loved this book. Read it in less than 2 days. Can’t wait to read the next 2 in this collection. Highly recommend! Character development is *chef’s kiss*

It’s a beautiful book. Full of heart, ordinary people doing the best they can.It reminded me that great stories invite you in. If you’re in the mood for something with real emotional weight, this one’s worth your time.

Une écriture lumineuse au service de vrais personnages qui continuent à encore vivre bien après avoir refermé le livre. Magnifique.

The characters are beautifully crafted. The author's detailed description of the scenery and characters will make you dive into the story of the book. Makes your heart light-weighted :)

Plainsong tells of six months in the lives of two sets of brothers - one old, one young - a father, an expectant mother and a teacher looking after her elderly dad, in Holt, Colorado. There are no guns or murders, no wars or mysteries - instead Plainsong is, as the title suggests, a 'plain song' - where every word is painstakingly chosen yet sounds absolutely real and right, a hymn to what makes us human. Should you be coming to this by way of Kent Haruf’s last and highly acclaimed novel, 'Our Souls At Night', I'd urge you to read this too as it has a similar sensibility, documenting the lives of ordinary people with acuity and pared back prose. Haruf has to be one of the kindest - if not *the* kindest - author I've yet read. Nonetheless he is utterly unsentimental; there's no sugar or puff here - bad things happen to good people, as they often do. There’s one more plus, if you’re a writer (as I am), because alongside the sheer pleasure of discovering a storyteller with an acute eye, a generous heart and a gift for language, to read such beautiful prose opens a door too, as only by reading those we admire and want to learn from can we grow and stretch ourselves. In any event, if you like your novels to touch the soul, then Plainsong will appeal to you.