Plainsong

Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up. When the sun reached the top of the windmill, for a while he watched what it was doing, that increased reddening of sunrise along the steel blades and the tail vane above the wooden platform. After a time he put out the cigarette and went upstairs and walked past the closed door behind which she lay in bed in the darkened guest room sleeping or not and when down the hall to the glassy room over the kitchen where the two boys were. (pg. 3)

Outside the house the wind came up suddenly out of the west and the tail vane turned with it and the blades of the windmill spun in a red whir, then the wind died down and the blades slowed and stopped. (pg. 4)

With these words the reader is introduced to a few of the inhabitants of Holt, a small farming town on the high plains in Eastern Colorado in Kent Haruf’s third novel, Plainsong. Plainsong is named after “the unisonous vocal music used in the Christian church from the earliest times; any simple and unadorned melody or air.” The author’s first two novels also take place in Holt, although in different times (Where You Once Belonged and The Tie That Binds) and Haruf’s simple language paints a clear picture of the landscape and the characters that inhabit it.

Haruf alternates his chapters, each concentrating on a different character or characters as they interact with each other. Tom is a teacher at the local high school and the father of two boys – a simple man who tries to be a good father, a good teacher, and a good friend. His wife begins the novel hiding in the guest room barely able to function. Victoria is a junior in high school, newly pregnant and tossed out of her house by an angry mom. And then there are the McPheron brother, bachelors living out on the family farm. Nothing earth shattering happens in Plainsong – the novel accurately reflects the music it is named for – the writing is spare, the plot unadorned. Even so, the novel is full of life, its connections, and the simple intertwining of lives that occurs due to proximity and the rhythm of everyday living.

There is a nice symmetry of life in this book – someone dies, a baby is born. The Guthrie boys (Ike and Bobby) connect with an elderly woman; The McPheron brothers, by connecting with a young woman, make a conscious decision to change, a decision which shows the true nature of courage isn’t just daring do but also the willingness to be open and to grow. And throughout the novel, we learn of the town of Holt as the Ike and Bobby do their paper route or Tom drives out into the country and the town and the surrounding area becomes a character in itself:

The bus went on and they crossed into Holt County, the country all flat and sandy again, the stunted stands of threes at the isolated farmhouses, the gravel section roads running exactly north and south like lines drawn in a child’s picture book and the four-strand fences rimming the bar ditches, and the barbed-wire fences and here and there a red mare with a new-foaled coat, and far away on the horizon to the south the low sandhills that looked as blue as plums. The winter wheat was the only real green. (pg. 242)

This was the second time I have read Plainsong (it was last month’s pick for my book group) and is just as good a read as it was the first time. A simple, quiet story about real people just dealing with life – a novel as simple, as full of hope, as descriptive as a true plainsong.

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