Plainsong by Kent Haruf

After the anguish of last week’s election, I looked for a book with characters that are kind, decent and removed from our current culture of crass and cruel behavior. I was so pleased to be under Kent Haruf‘s spell in his fictitious town of Holt, Colorado. In this beautiful and heartwarming novel, that was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award, Haruf introduces his readers to several characters living in a small town on the eastern plains of Colorado. Haruf’s rich dialogue allows the characters to speak for themselves with little intrusion from the author. It’s not a deep psychological exploration, but Haruf provides sufficient psychological clues about people to make the story rewarding to read.

When high school English teacher Maggie Jones, drives up to the cattle ranch of Harold and Raymond McPherson and asks them to consider letting one of her students live with them, they are startled and shaken. The young girl is pregnant and has been evicted from her single mother’s house. The McPherson brothers have spent decades living their days in a predictable routine organized around the feeding, birthing and selling of cattle. They eat three meals a day and read the local newspaper at night. They tell Maggie they will think about it.

In explaining this option to the 17-year old girl, Victoria Roubideaux, Maggie shares why these two old brothers live together without families of their own. “Both their folks died in a highway truck wreck when these old men were younger than you are now.”

The brothers silently contemplate Maggie’s proposal and then decide to let Victoria live with them. Here is the dialogue leading up to their decision.

“All right,” Harold said. “I know what I think.  What do you think we do with her?”

“We take her in,” Raymond said.

 “Harold looked out into the gathering darkness. I’m talking about-why hell, look at us.  Old men alone.  Decrepit old bachelors out here in the country seventeen miles from the closest town, which don’t amount to much of a good goddam even when you get there.  Think of us.  Crotchety and ignorant.  Lonesome. Independent. Set in all our ways. How you going to change now at this age of life?”

“I can’t say”, Raymond said. “But I’m going to. That’s what I know.”

Reading Harufs’s book is like traveling to a simpler time. People’s lives seem clearer and more contained. Without cell phones and constant stimulation, many of the characters say very little. They spend time thinking and pondering; they spend time alone with their thoughts. When they do speak, the reader listens. The characters are constrained by many factors including their own personalities and the small town milieu where they live. The novel is not without violence and dysfunction; there are plenty of mental health issues, a teen pregnancy, bullying and a painful divorce.  But it is not the gratuitous violence and dysfunction that seems to permeate our culture today.

Since Holt is a small town, most of the characters’ behaviors and comments are restrained. They have the discipline not to say everything that comes to their mind. Each of the characters struggles and makes mistakes. But they do the best they can with who they are and what they have. By the end of the novel, the characters have grown and stretched. By spending time with these kind and decent people, I feel like I have grown and stretched with them.