A Spare, Beautiful Novel of the High Plains

A Review of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong

There’s a fair bit of cattle roping in this book, including a particularly ornery red calf. Photo by Rachel Lees on StockSnap

This week’s review is a bit of an oldie: Kent Haruf’s 1999 National Book Award finalist Plainsong. A copy of this novel sat unread first on my mother’s bookshelves for almost twenty years and more recently on mine. I finally picked it up last week after hearing a writer recommend Haruf’s work at AWP, the writing conference I recently attended in Seattle.

Haruf was a fan of William Faulkner, and much like Faulkner’s fictional town of Jefferson, largely believed to be modeled after his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, Haruf grounds his work in his own single postage stamp of soil: the fictionalized town of Holt on the high plains of eastern Colorado, where Haruf lived in the 1980s. I, too, am a big Faulkner fan, which might explain why Haruf’s style appealed to me so much. Haruf’s writing is less like the long-winded flourishes of Absalom, Absalom or the experimental first person narrators in As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury but rather more like Light in August. The writing is beautiful but spare in a way that reminded me of hand-hewn furniture. While there may not be much elaborate ornamentation, a close inspection reveals understated but elegant workmanship. The title refers to a Christian tradition of simple chant and likewise gives a nod to this aesthetic.

The novel interweaves the storylines of four major characters/character pairs: a pregnant high school girl, two young brothers whose mother is withdrawing into depression, a high school teacher (and the father of the two boys) who is dealing with his failing marriage and a conflict with a belligerent student, and two elderly bachelor farmer brothers who lost their parents in an accident as children. The story moves chronologically, in relatively short chapters focusing on the character(s) for whom the chapter is titled. Haruf generally uses a limited third person point of view, though occasionally he subtly disrupts the perspective in satisfying ways, especially when he brings the four arcs together in the final chapter.

As the book progresses, Haruf gently ratchets up the tension with periodic twists, but most of the reading pleasure for me was in his gift for developing characters primarily through carefully rendered action and dialogue, with minimal exposition. If you enjoy a quieter, character- and place-driven book, this one is well worth hunting down.