Review of Plainsong (1999) by Kent Haruf

One good measure of a book is to be 100 pages deep before you notice. 100 feels like ten and before you know it you’re caught in the intricacies and complexities of the story, the characters, the author's vision.

Plainsong moves gracefully with simplicity and clarity. Like its environment, its people are without artifice or ornament. The book is an ode to the Midwest, the Great Plains, the fundamental essence of the spirit of people and place. Through an examination of small-town life, the narration observes time passing through streets, pastures, livestock and conflict whose presence is larger than the plains on which they live. The story centers around six main characters. Three are family, a father and his two sons, and the other two are brothers who find themselves in a makeshift family.

Its themes are common to the American experience: family, marriage, divorce, childhood, the inextricable bond between fathers and sons, brothers and mothers and their children. But looming over this web of interaction is a larger, more meaningful idea. The author finds the metaphysical core of existence in these simple, intertwining stories. Isolation is an undercurrent common to them all, and its manifestations are cultivated intelligently. Haruf's style is good, clean, tight prose. The writing and the thinking behind it are not overdone. The fiction is suggestive and not over-literal or fake.

The narration operates on a few different levels. There are different worlds in this small one in the middle of Colorado, east of Denver. There is the childhood world of Ike and Bobby and their touching concern for the old lady, their interest in the older girl and her boyfriends; there is the adolescent world of Victoria in the process of becoming a woman; the adult world of Tom who's picking up the pieces off a failed marriage; and the two brothers, indifferent almost to it all.

Victoria Ribideaux, reminiscent of the protagonist in Faulkner's Intruder at Dust, is the pivotal figure. A teenager, pregnant and on her own, she is taken in by two eccentric brothers. Their generosity is exceptional and grounded in a complex form of altruism. Here life is not too complicated. Nothing happens – there is no climax, no epiphanies, revelations, or anything artificial or melodramatic. A baby is born into the world. Time grows, becomes and passes through the Great Plains.