Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32103 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Plainsong, according to Kent Haruf's epigraph, is "any simple and unadorned melody or air." It's a perfect description of this lovely, rough-edged book, set on the very edge of the Colorado plains. Tom Guthrie is a high school teacher whose wife can't--or won't--get out of bed; the McPherons are two bachelor brothers who know little about the world beyond their farm gate; Victoria Roubideaux is a pregnant 17-year-old with no place to turn. Their lives parallel each other in much the same way any small-town lives would--until Maggie Jones, another teacher, makes them intersect. Even as she tries to draw Guthrie out of his black cloud, she sends Victoria to live with the two elderly McPheron brothers, who know far more about cattle than about teenage girls. Trying to console her when she think she's hurt her baby, the best lie they can come up with is this: "I knew of a heifer we had one time that was carrying a calf, and she got a length of fencewire down her some way and it never hurt her or the calf."

Holt, Colorado, is the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone's business before that business even happens. In a way, that's true of the book, too. There's not a lot of suspense here, plot wise; you can see each narrative twist and turn coming several miles down the pike. What Plainsong has instead is note-perfect dialogue, surrounded by prose that's straightforward yet rich in particulars: "a woman walking a white lapdog on a piece of ribbon" glimpsed from a car window; the boys' mother, her face "as pale as schoolhouse chalk"; the smells of hay and manure, the variations of prairie light. Even the novel's larger questions are sized to a domestic scale. Will Guthrie find love? Will Victoria run away with the father of her baby? Will the McPherons learn to hold a conversation? But in this case, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and Plainsong manages to capture nothing less than an entire world--fencing pliers, calf-pullers, and all. Kent Haruf has a gorgeous ear, and a knack for rendering the simple complex. --Mary Park

Synopsis
Set in Colorado in the 1980s, "Plainsong" tells the story of various Holt residents. There's teenager Victoria Roubideaux, pregnant and homeless, taken in by two ageing, shy and somewhat taciturn cattle-farming brothers - and the changes wrought in all their lives as a result. Then there's high-school teacher and single-father, Tom Gutherie, who has two sons, Ike and Bobby, and a second chance at romance in the shape of colleague Maggie Jones. Filled with unforgettable characters, "Plainsong" is both convincing and compelling; a glorious, eloquent waltz of a novel. 'Like all the best novels, "Plainsong" takes you into a world that is at once real and vividly imagined. Here is a poetry of landscape, a tender and passionate evocation of ordinary people in majestic country ...written with a kind of compassion that makes it ultimately powerfully uplifting' - Niall Williams. 'With its gentle touch and simple, precise prose, Haruf's novel scores a direct hit on his readers' hearts. "Plainsong" is a perfectly formed, beautifully executed piece of writing that will stay with you long after you reluctantly put it down' - Mariella Frostrup, "Mail on Sunday".

Customer Reviews

A GEM OF A BOOK
I picked up this book and couldn't put it down again. It's a wonderful story. I loved the two old brothers, who i thought were very funny when dealing with the teenage pregnant girl Victoria. They just have no idea about females but this relationship between them and Victoria is beautiful and very moving. It's such a lovely read, i will never forget this story.

far from plain
The epigraph tells us that plainsong is 'unisonous vocal music...any simple and unadorned melody or air'.There are four main 'voices' in this novel which name the chapters; Victoria Roubideaux who finds herself pregnant and homeless at 17, the elderly McPheron brothers who take her in on their remote farm, Tom Guthrie a school teacher whose marriage is in trouble and his two sons Ike and Bobby. But there is another character, Maggie Jones, who quietly connects these voices in unison, bringing Guthrie out of himself and Victoria and theMcPherons together. What Haruf has created is an entirely believable account of a small town and the people who make it up.

When Victoria is thrown out of home by her mother it is Maggie who comforts her but opens her eyes, 'Honey, you've got to wake up. It's time for you to wake up now...Listen to me. You're here now. This is where you are'. Maggie's senile father makes it impossible for her to take her in herself so she fosters the connection with the McPherons 'You're going to die someday without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway. This is your chance'. It is a challenge the brothers accept and Haruf shows brilliantly their incomprehension and heartwarming efforts to accommodate her. On arriving and taking her tour of the house she notices 'hanging over the drying rods next to the bathtub, together with the two old towels, was a single fresh new pink towel that still had the store tag stapled to it.' When Maggie tells them they need to engage a woman in conversation of a evening their first hilarious attempt is a discussion about market forces. But slowly, steadily, they come to depend on each other and the brothers become like worried parents especially as the due date draws ever nearer. Much of the humour in the novel comes from the McPheron's exchanges. After Harold equates Victoria's restlessness with a pregnant heifer of theirs;

'She's a girl for christsakes. She's not a cow. You can't rate girls and cows together.
I was only just saying, Harold said. What are you getting so riled up about it for?
I don't appreciate you saying she's a heifer.
I never said she was one. I wouldn't say that for money.
It sounded like it to me. Like you was.
I just thought of it, is all, Harold said. Don't you ever think of something?
Yeah. I think of something sometimes.
Well then.
But I don't have to say it. Just because I think of it
All right. I talked out before I thought. You want to shoot me now or wait till full dark?
I'll have to let you know, Raymond said.


Tom Guthrie's wife Ella slowly estranges herself first by retreating to the bedroom, then a house across the street and finally by moving away to her sisters. With this and trouble at the school where he teaches he is distracted from the care of his two boys Ike and Bobby who find a surrogate parent in Mrs Stearns an old woman on their paper round. It is Maggie who draws him back into social life, showing her real strength in capturing this drifting man.

Throughout, Haruf writes with the kind of quiet confidence that comes from writers of a certain age. He shows great structural skill giving us first a brutal section showing the McPheron's checking their cows for calves and then Victoria's first examination by a doctor filled with compassion and her relief at finding all is well with the baby. His vivid descriptions of ordinary life give the reader a picture like clarity and he allows the spareseness of his characters language to show the unsentimental nature of life on the Colorado plains.

Beauty in simplicity
If you want thrill, this is not the book for you. It does just what it suggests on the cover and the title - it is a layering together of simple stories in an ordinary way that in its ensemble makes a beautiful melody of the lives involved. This is a book of heart and soul told in a beautiful lyrical fashion. Sure the plot is thin and that's part of the beauty - everyday life isn't jampacked with adventure. Just let the words and the characters wash over you.