A plain and ordinary treasure

This book tricked me. It fooled me into thinking at first that it was about mostly small things, really not much more than brief glimpses into the lives of a few characters. I was also caught off guard by how carefully structured the novel is. The separate threads seem to be concretely just that – separate – but as the story progresses, the different characters are drawn tighter together, smoothly and beautifully, to form one cohesive picture. And this picture is not of small things. It is about a small town and ordinary people but also the most important things in life, laid out bare, unadorned, made plain by the end of the novel.

In Plainsong less is definitely more
Plain is a word with many synonyms. Artless. Candid. Clear. Humble. Ordinary. Simple. All of these adjectives describe this book, at least on the surface. The language is simple and sparse, with usually only the most minimal descriptions of characters. The dialog is written without any quotation marks, reduced to only the most necessary and weighty words. Kent Haruf writes in a third person narrative voice that never once conveys the thoughts of any characters. Everything to be gleaned about the characters in this novel must be done through plain language and stark descriptions.

Holt, Colorado: a mosaic of cows, sunsets and struggling people
The central characters live in the fictional town of Holt, a few hours outside of Denver. I don’t want to give many details about them, or I will reveal too much of the story. Just brief descriptions:

Guthrie is a high school teacher estranged from his wife and raising two young sons.
Victoria Roubideaux is a teenager who is kicked out of her house by her mother when she finds out she is pregnant.
Ike and Bobby are lonely brothers, eight and nine years old, who have been abandoned by their mother.
The McPherons are two old farmer brothers who never married and the rhythm of their lives has not changed in over fifty years.

Haruf carefully crafts the action and minimalist dialog to create interesting and distinct characters. I was quickly drawn in, wanting to know what would happen to all of these seemingly ordinary people. All the central characters change in the story through events that just summarize might make them seem unremarkable, but to witness these changes in detail through the book, they seem extraordinary. I was brought to tears more than once, so well did I empathize with the characters (this does not happen too often).

A few potential drawbacks for others, but I found none
This book may frustrate readers who want to be inside the heads of characters – at least the main ones. Its lack of one central narrative focus may also be disconcerting. I was unfamiliar with author and had no idea what to expect when I opened this book. All I knew was from the back cover and that it was a National Book Award finalist – which does not at all guarantee I will like a book. This novel far surpassed what I expected from the beginning. If you missed it when it was on the bestseller list, pick it up now. It is a moving and entertaining read.