The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf
Kent Haruf has become my favorite writer. All of his novels that I have read take place in or around the small Colorado town of Holt, in the high plains outside of Denver. He writes about the ordinary rural lives and struggles those people are faced with.
The Tie that Binds is about two neighbors, one is the Goodnough family with a domineering and cruel father, and the other family the Roscoes, made up of a generous aboriginal mother and her son, who strive to help Edith and her brother Lyman, the unfortunate children of that cruel father, throughout their lives.
As you might expect, the novel is not a light-hearted one, but a dramatic one that shows the struggles of rural farmers, and the sometimes wasted lives they live. It does also show the genuine kindness and humanity of others. I found it to very memorable and thought provoking.
The story begins in the 1890’s with a young newly married couple in Ohio. Roy, the husband works on a farm and hates being bossed around. After discovering that cheap land in Colorado might give him a chance to be his own boss and own his own farmland, he moves Ada his wife to the barren planes outside Holt to start from scratch, to make a farm.
It is there that Edith and Lyman are born. It is unforgiving country, and while Roy is focused only on his farm building, Ada slowly loses hope in her life, gives up and dies. The children Edith and Lyman, are then forced to live under their taskmaster father, and basically have no childhood at all.
As they mature, Edith and Lyman’s only chance at normalcy is provided by John Roscoe, the neighboring boy who provides small hours of escape from their father’s domineering. John and Edith start to connect romantically, but then Roy the father, loses all of his fingers in a horrific farm accident and becomes entirely dependent on the kids, and the accident makes him even more cruel. Roy totally destroys any hope of happiness in the future, for his children, especially Edith, who becomes his caregiver. Nevertheless, the neighboring Roscoe family continues to provide whatever comfort they can to her.
While the novel isn’t really uplifting, but the story does give the reader a realistic glimpse into the lives in the rural west, and does show both the wasted of lives of some and the kindness and humanity of others. Its storyline makes it one of the most memorable stories I have ever read.
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