Plainsong - Kent Haruf

 Kent Haruf, whom I admit I'd never heard of, wrote a handful of novels, all set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado.  Plainsong (1999) was his 'middle' novel, and apparently most successful, winning a bunch of literary prizes.

What Haruf pulls off here is an ordinary domestic drama, handled so tenderfully, so delicately, that it becomes something much more.  Yet we lack more or less all detail.  We get only superficial descriptions of the main characters.  The landscape is evoked but never nailed down.  Everything is entrusted to atmosphere and dialogue.  The characters reveal themselves in the way they talk, albeit most of the time they are exchanging superficial politeness.  And yet the story throbs with life.  The characters draw us in.

There are basically two stories at play.  They only come together in the last chapter.  Teacher Tom Guthrie's wife has suffered some sort of breakdown.  She spends all her time in bed until she ups and moves to her sister's apartment in Denver.  It quickly becomes apparent she is never coming back to Holt.  So Tom is left with two young boys to bring up.  Meanwhile sixteen year old Victoria Roubideaux falls pregnant.  The boy wants nothing to do with her.  Her mother throws her out of the house.  Her only recourse is schoolteacher Maggie Jones, who takes her in but can't keep her because of her senile father.  So she places Victoria with two elderly bachelor brothers, Harold and Raymond McPheron, at their farm outside of town.  The relationship that builds between the young girl and the two old men is probably the most beautiful thing in the book.  The iron-hard oldsters also provide an element of gentle comedy.

Tom is subject to a complaint from the aggressive parents of a loutish student.  The student himself takes out his resentment on Tom's sons, ten year old Ike and eight year old Bobby.  This moment of malice somehow equates to the farm-life in which animals are sometimes brutally born yet gently eased into death.  The detail of a calf being successfully yanked out of its mother by the McPherons and Ike's horse being put to sleep by the local vet stand out powerfully from the soft pastoral background.

Plainsong is an extraordinary book, highly recommended.  For once, the 'big name' introduction - by Peter Carey - adds to our understanding and appreciation of what follows.

The Chemistry of Tears - Peter Carey

What a brilliant artist Peter Carey is.  Not only can he do different voices and literary styles (compare Parrot and Olivier, Jack Maggs and History of the Kelly Gang) but his structure, the framework on which his story hangs, can be dazzling.  Here, the structure is as cunningly wrought as the automaton which brings together Henry in the 1850s and Catherine in 2010.

Henry has convinced himself that the only way he can save his consumptive young son is to commission him a clockwork duck of the utmost ingenuity.  To do so, he has to travel to Germany, home of the cuckoo clock.  He describes his experiences there in a series of journals.  The journals are read 160 years later by Catherine, a horological conservator, who has been given the task of restoring Henry's automaton to take her mind of the sudden death of her longterm lover.

The writing styles of our two narrators are distinct but they are linked early on by shared personal tragedy and loss of love.  Embroidered through the narrative is the unfolding ecological tragedy of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (hence the choice of 2010) and the mid-Victorian parallel of the onset of the industrial revolution and its effect on both landscape and craftsmanship.  And to round it all off, a highly amusing twist (which Carey has been dropping hints about all along) concerning the wunderkind Carl.

Not one word wasted - and again, as with le Carre's A Most Wanted Man, a perfectly crafted ending, sufficient unto the purpose and no flummery.

For my reviews of other Carey novels, which predate this blog, see my media and culture blog.