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Plainsong
Kent Haruf. Vintage Contemporaries: 2000 (paperback). ISBN: 0375705856. 320 pages.
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Spare. Magical. Perfect. And right in our backyard. Haruf's novel, set in Holt,
Colorado, will take its place among the great small town stories, the great western stories, the great American stories, of
the century. It would be interesting to look at it as a descendent of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, or as a
sibling of Annie Proulx's Close Range. Its narrative voice is unlike anything else you've encountered, so simple that
it takes your breath away. It's easy to describe what happens in this book-seven ordinary people encounter some of life's
most common problems, coming together in the end to form an unusual, but logical sort of family. But to describe how Haruf
makes this happen is a much trickier matter, and efforts to do so guarantee an intense book group discussion. A finalist for
the 1999 National Book Award.
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