'Plainsong' author to speak at Borders

By Lucas Millheim

For the Daily

At the heart of Kent Haruf's novel "Plainsong" stands a number of men, women and children, individually but not separate. All have been damaged by love or stunted from lack of it; all are lonely.

"It is still possible for people of good will to connect in these times," Mr. Haruf said from his home in southern Illinois. "We have to find our connection to other people in unexpected places."

The forming of unlikely bonds between people of good will is the subject of "Plainsong." Victoria Roubideaux is a seventeen-year-old high school student in a small Colorado town with a big problem: She's pregnant and very alone. Her mother has kicked her out of the house and her boyfriend is miles away in Denver. Having nowhere to turn, she looks for refuge to Maggie Jones, a teacher at the high school.

Tom Guthrie is another teacher at the school in Holt. His wife is suffering an unexplained psychological crisis and spends all her time in dark seclusion; later she leaves the house altogether. Tom is left to raise their two sons alone.

Balanced between Tom Guthrie and Victoria Roubideaux and rounding out the main phalanx of characters are the elderly McPheron brothers, solitary bachelor-farmers. Early in the novel we get a sense that the two brothers have missed out on a portion of life. Maggie Jones comes close to the mark when she says to them, "You're going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life."

It is with the simple strands of these lives and the relationships that develop between them that Haruf constructs his story, and it is a testament to his skill as a storyteller that he finds great power and beauty in such apparent simplicity.

Several moments in the novel are deeply moving; even more so because Haruf does not crowd the reader with them. Rather, he presents them directly, and lets the emotion work on its own.

Haruf infuses "Plainsong" with an authentic voice of the prairie. His prose is spare and elemental, conveying both humor and pathos equally well. The novel is of one piece; a single language and sentiment pervade both the opening chapters and the last lines.

"Plainsong" is a deeply moral novel and has the power to shock the reader with this realization. In recent fiction, as in other areas of contemporary life, true morality (as opposed to finger wagging or sentimentality) is a scarce commodity.

The novel has gotten a good deal of media attention, and perhaps this tincture of unsentimental morality is one reason why. Typically reticent urban book reviewers have raved over "Plainsong;" it was a finalist last year for the National Book Award.

In speaking of the rural towns and villages in which he was raised and that are the subjects of his novels, Mr. Haruf says: "It gives (one) a sense of place. In a small town, the pace is slow enough, you learn to look at things more carefully. In a city, there's no way to know all the different aspects of life ... (Y)ou can get a distorted sense of humanity."

Young writer, take heed: If Kent Haruf knows of what he speaks, (and this novel seems to indicate that he does), then perhaps the location of your yet unwritten novel should not be Manhattan or Chicago or Menlo Park, but rather Washtenaw County.

Courtesy of Knopf