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A review of Plainsong

by Kent Haruf

Set in Holt, Colorado, this novel brings members of four different generations together in surprising and heartfelt ways.

Reviewed by: Joan Prefontaine
About Joan Prefontaine

Plainsong The story is familiar-a seventeen year old girl is pregnant and has been kicked out of her home; a high school teacher's wife is depressed and lies in bed while his two boys seek adventures to distract them from what is going on at home. But what happens in the course of the story is more surprising. It involves a reaching out across generational divides.

It is rare for novelists to depict elderly people as having strength of character, let alone wisdom. But Kent Haruf is no ordinary author. Writing across gender and age lines, he reveals his older characters as carrying, with some dignity, the valuable measure of their years.

When the pregnant teen, Victoria Roubideaux, moves in with the McPheron brothers, two elderly bachelor farmers, who agree to help her cope and prepare for the baby, she wonders nervously what she has in store. The brothers, she finds, are not accustomed to much conversation, but they show a concern that goes quickly beyond mere hospitality. Haruf describes the brothers' kindness in small, matter-of-fact ways, such as when one of them finds two thick, wool blankets to cover her, in case she is cold in her new bedroom: "He stood for a quiet moment looking at her, at the room and all its new disturbances and the things in it, and then he spread the two blankets over her in the bed." Although the McPherons are better at discussing cow problems than human ones, they provide a real shelter from the storm for her.

Haruf does not sentimentalize old age, however. He shows the loneliness and frustrating infirmities that often come with age. When the boys, Ike and Bobbie, befriend an old woman, Iva Stearns, on their paper route, she is described not as a lovely, smiling, grandmotherly woman but as a "humpbacked woman in a thin blue housedress and apron, wearing a pair of men's wool socks inside her worn slippers, leaning on her twin silver canes." The boys are cautious, but they make no judgments based on Iva's appearance or the state of her living conditions. Like Victoria, they recognize true kindness for what it is.

In spite of her frailties (and poverty), Iva decides to bake cookies with the boys and sends them shopping for the ingredients. When they return, she has trouble standing up to move to the kitchen. Haruf, with a few carefully chosen words, touchingly reveals the impulse to help that the boys feel: "Slowly she began to rise from the chair, pushing back with her fisted hands against the armrests. They wanted to help her but didn't know where she might be touched. At last she stood erect. It's ridiculous to get old, she said. It's stupid and ridiculous. She took up her canes. Stand back so I don 't trip on you."

This is a wonderful, generous story that might just trip you up, and keep you reading for a while.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Plainsong

Copyright © by Joan Prefontaine, 2003

Reviewed by Joan Prefontaine:
-- The Secret Life of Dust - by Hannah Holmes
-- Lying Awake: - by Mark Salzman
-- The Art & Craft of Playwriting - by Jeffrey Hatcher
-- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - by Stephen King
-- Earth Prayers From Around the World - Edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon
-- The Beauty of the Beast - Selected by Jack Prelutsky, Illustrated by Meilo So
-- The Intimate Merton - Edited by Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo
-- Plainsong - by Kent Haruf
-- The Stone Diaries - by Carol Shields
-- City of God - by E. L. Doctorow









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