Plainsong
Kent Haruf
Picador £10, pp301
Buy it at BOL
According to this novel's epigraph, plainsong is 'unisonous vocal music used in the Christian church from the earliest times; any simple and unadorned melody or air'. Medieval European music and the prairies of the Midwest might seem an unlikely combination, but Kent Haruf's Plainsong is a well-crafted investigation into how disparate voices, each unique and unconnected, can come together in the most unlikely of circumstances.
Set in a small town, Holt in Colorado, at some point in the present, Plainsong follows the parallel lives of individuals who share little else than belonging to fractured families and being muted by their own pain. Pregnant teenager Victoria has 'a private feeling that she didn't know how to talk about'. Fading schoolteacher Tom Guthrie feels 'mixed up and wooden' after his depressed wife abandons him, and his mild children look quietly on while their favourite horse is shot and gutted before them.
Only another teacher, Maggie Jones, whose husband has also left home, offers a key to their silence. 'Honey,' she says to Victoria when the teenager turns to her for help, 'it's time for you to wake up now.' The wake-up call is for the young woman to take responsibility for being a single parent. It is also a signal for the rest of the community to contemplate and eventually act upon.
Many American writers such as Cormac McCarthy have handled the subject of Midwest prairie towns and uncommunicative inhabitants before. Fiction, too, has often relied on musical form for narrative structure. Haruf, however, offers a fresh approach by creating layers which intensify and deepen as the novel progresses, alternating between each character's life at every chapter. Like the 'unadorned melody' in the book's epigraph, the prose is simple and understated - 'Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window, smoking cigarettes' - and details are vivid and uncluttered - 'The pick-up lifted a powdery plume from the road'.
Occasionally, the novel is weakened by its slow, drawn-out narrative, inevitable plot and monophonic characters. Yet this is the story of a rural community where life is regulated by the seasons, the weather and family chores and where drama is not responded to by drama. It is where the pace of small-town life is echoed in the cadence and humour of dialogue. 'I knew a heifer we had one time that was carrying a calf,' one of the old cattle ranchers tells the terrified teenager as he drives her to hospital to have her baby. 'And she got a length of fence wire down her some way and it never hurt her.'
True to its title, Plainsong is a vocal book that deserves to be read out loud. It is not the generic fable of a dysfunctional community transforming into a happy whole, although the pervading feeling is optimistic, but rather an unsentimental meditation on the consequences of isolation and the universal necessity for relationships, even if they are awkward and unsolicited.
