Plainsong

Kent Haruf

Sometimes the simplest stories are the best. Haruf paints a picture of half a year in a small Colorado town, intertwining the lives of seven people into one powerful novel. While it wouldn't be accurate to call the book plot-driven, it's not your typical character study, either; too much goes on. Haruf's book inhabits the same literary terrain as does Cormac McCarthy's wonderful novel Child of God; it's a character-based book that reads too well to be a character-based book.

The main plot thread, if there is one, concerns Victoria Roubideaux, a sixteen-year-old high-school junior who gets pregnant and is thrown out of her house. Her story touches that of the rest of the folks the book centers on, including two of her teachers, the two sons of one of those teachers, and a pair of brothers who have never known anything but the farm upon which they were born and raised. It is partially Victoria's plight that brings about the changes in these characters, but it's also just the way life goes; you live, you experience things, you learn from them. That's the way it's supposed to be, anyway, and Haruf creates a controlled world in his small town where the hand of the creator is, at least, invisible. This lends the book a fascinating realism, as if there weren't enough here in the simple stories of the simple people portrayed to keep you going anyway. I doubt there are more than a handful of people who haven't already read this book; hopefully, they'll get around to it soon.