“Plainsong,” which is only now arriving in stores, takes place in a little town east of Denver. There’s a large cast. But the most compelling characters are newspaper boys named Ike and Bobby, whose mom seems to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown, and a high-schooler named Victoria Roubideaux. In short order, Victoria finds out she’s pregnant and gets thrown out of her house. The father’s name is Dwayne–enough said–and when he disappears, Victoria is taken in by the gruff old McPheron brothers, who never married and who know far more about cattle than they know about womenfolk. Here’s one brother trying to think of the word for bathroom: “Why hell. You know. The commode. The indoor outhouse.”
Haruf’s novel moves slowly at times, and some of the characters are so overly familiar that, even early on, you know the sort of songs the author means to play on your heartstrings. Still, the book is written in a fine, spare prose, and it’s generous in spirit. By the end, “Plainsong” is a moving look at our capacity for both pointless cruelty and simple decency, our ability to walk out of the wreckage of one family and build a stronger one where it used to stand. Ike and Bobby see things they are far too young to see–sex, death, etc.–even as their mother drifts away. Victoria and the McPherons construct a life: “Together they made a kind of parade. People on the square… watched them pass, turning to stare as the two old men and the pregnant girl went by.”
Haruf himself grew up the son of a Methodist preacher in Colorado. “I’ve done a whole bunch of different jobs,” says the author, 56. “Worked on farms and ranches. Orphanages. Hospitals. All kinds of things. I was simply trying to make a living.” For nine years he’s been teaching at Southern Illinois University, at Carbondale. Haruf seems pleased, but overwhelmed, by the enthusiasm for his novel: “I had no expectations. I hadn’t published a book for, what, eight or nine years. I really had no clue about the quality of the book. I thought it was OK–as good as I could make it.”
The conventional wisdom is that authors get only one chance in this world. If your first novel doesn’t sell, publishers and bookstores lose interest and your career stalls, barring an act of God or Oprah. But Haruf’s early novels are set to come out in paperback next summer, and “Plainsong” has become a priority at Knopf. “The sales reps have been talking about the book nonstop,” says Knopf’s director of independent bookselling, Ruth Liebmann, “and at a certain point the booksellers started talking to each other. I don’t know how to describe it–spontaneous combustion.” Now comes the moment when the public weighs in. Watch for fireworks over the plains.
