Plainsong by Kent Haruf

         It is always wonderful to discover an author whose novels really make a connection to you.  I was fortunate to come upon Plainsong by Kent Haruf, and immediately became captivated by the engaging characters he created in small rural town of Holt, in the high plains of Colorado.  Since that discovery I have eagerly read three more of his other novels, and enjoyed and was touched by each of them.  Here is a review of Plainsong:

Plainsong by Kent Haruf

    This was one of the best novels I have ever read.  Even before I got halfway through it, I began to dread that it was soon going to end, and I wanted more.  Fortunately, I later discovered that it was the first novel of a trilogy (Plainsong, Eventide, and Benediction) which I am pretty sure it will take up the few of the unresolved events that took place in Plainsong.

    Why did I like this novel so much?  Certainly it was the realness of the small town characters of Holt, Colorado:  The ordinary lives they lived, and the everyday problems they were faced with.  What I really loved was the humanity of those main characters and how they tried to help one another out.  Everything about the novel seemed realistic and genuine, the dialogues, the locations, and the lives that were being lived.  Believability has always been one of the main characteristics that I look for when I read.

    The characters all seem like people you would find in a small rural town; this one in the windswept high plains near Denver.  The main characters include a  high school teacher with a strong moral compass, raising his two young sons after his wife, who was going through an emotional crisis, gave up on her marriage and rural life, to move away to Denver and live with her sister.  

          There is a woman high school teacher who shows compassion to a seventeen year old student, after the girl’s mother kicked her out of the house, when she discovered that her daughter was pregnant.  

           There are are also the two elderly McPheron batchlor brothers, who grew up on their own, when as teens they lost their parents in an automobile accident and then lived together working the family ranch, where they never developed many social skills with women.  They lived narrow, joyless, work-oriented, lives on their cattle ranch which changed suddenly, when faced with a situation that ended up giving meaning and purpose to the drab and isolated lives that they lived.  The McPherons became one of my all time favorite memorable characters from a novel (the other being Augustus in Lonesome Dove).

    Kent Haruf did a wonderful job or knitting the lives of these realistic rural characters together to construct a touching and engaging story of life in a small, contemporary  western town.

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