Synopsis
In alternating points of view, Haruf chronicles several lives in a small town in Colorado. The plot involves Tom Guthrie, whose wife leaves him with their two little boys; a young pregnant girl who is thrown out of her house by her mother; the elderly McPheron brothers who take her in; and Maggie Jones, Tom's kindhearted colleague.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2000-08-01 | | Series: | Vintage Contemporaries Series |
| Size | | Length: | 301 pages | | Height: | 8.0 in | | Width: | 5.3 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 9.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
From the unsettled lives of a small-town teacher struggling to raise two boys alone in the face of their mother's retreat from life, a pregnant teenage girl with nowhere to go, and two elderly bachelor farmers emerges a new vision of life and family as their diverse destinies intertwine.
Industry Reviews
"Though [Kent Haruf's] third novel, PLAINSONG, is relatively uneventful--a year in the lives of normal folk in the small prairie town of Holt, Colo.--his mesmerizing language draws the reader in, fascinating even with his depictions of the most mundane occurrences....Haruf's haunting, virtuosic writing...is both spare and descriptive, as painstaking in capturing vagueness as it is precise detailing the concrete."
Saffian
"When was the last time I read an entire novel in two days? Probably 55 years ago, when I was a teenager....[N]ow, half a century later, I've had the delightful experience once again of becoming so absorbed in a book that I couldn't have slowed down if I tried.....The book is Kent Haruf's PLAINSONG, the most controlled, cohesive novel I've come across in a long time....[A]s flawlessly unified as a short story by Poe or Chekhov."
Hassler
"If a novelist invents a world, then Mr. Haruf has shaped a place of enormous goodness, in which the deprived are grateful for whatever they are given. As these people move from the wrong kind of trouble to the right kind--from isolation toward connectedness--they falter in the sweetest of ways....[B]rusque tenderness is the hallmark of this novel....[T]he story itself -- spare, unsentimental, rooted in action--honors the values of the community it describes."
Michaels
"[A] plainspoken and moving novel--a novel that weaves together the voices of half a dozen people living in a small Colorado town and turns their overlapping stories into a powerful portrait of a community bound together by history, memory and the simple bonds of neighborly responsibility and affection."
Kakutani
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