Review: Plainsong

I am occasionally delighted by a discovery in the little free library down the road (and grateful for the crowd-sourced curation of this local collection). This week’s discovery was the 26-year-old novel, Plainsong by Kent Haruf. Although widely praised at the time of its publication in 1999 and spawning a film version in 2004, it never caught my attention as I was, at the time, fully immersed in the parental wrangling of ornery teenagers as they butted their way through the transition from high school to college. So if you, like me, are one of those who were a bit too distracted in 1999 to notice a literary classic-in-the-making as it floated by, I am more than happy to resurrect Plainsong and recommend it for your 2025 to-be-read list.

The setting for Plainsong is the fictional small town of Holt in the flat and arid high plains of eastern Colorado. The time period is generic pre-computer could-be 50’s or 60’s era with cars, phones, and televisions as the dominant technologies. The story is told from a broad set of perspectives: A high school teacher estranged from his wife, his female romantic interest, his two sons (aged nine and ten), two reclusive aging cattle ranchers, and a pregnant high-school girl. How these character groups are interrelated and how they handle a common set of challenging social circumstances and bring them to resolution is the core of the storyline, however, it is the way Haruf paints each character through narrative and dialog that gives the story its true texture. Each character is developed in a series of short chapters presented in a round-robin fashion, each chapter advancing the individual character’s story until all the storylines converge to reveal a larger story: that of the collective strength and beauty of community. This larger story is reflective of the book title, Plainsong, which is a style of Western Christian music that consists of a round of 5 monotonic parts, sung consecutively, much as the five central character groups are presented in consecutive chapters.

Haruf’s prose and dialog are presented in a similar monotonic manner. As I began the first chapter, I wasn’t immediately enamored of this style as I tend to be impatient when it comes to overly detailed scene descriptions or unnecessary filler, and the first few pages of Plainsong seemed to be heading in that direction. The sudden appearance of unpunctuated dialog and minimal attribution didn’t assuage my reservations, but I was drawn into the developing scene, so I kept reading. I am glad that I did as it soon became apparent that Haruf was in full control of his slightly unconventional style of writing and that any difficulty I had at the start was the fault of my own closed-minded expectations. It didn’t take long for me to adapt to Haruf’s rhythm and quickly become enchanted by the detailed but brief scene setups and remarkably well-crafted character-defining dialog. The lack of quotation marks, instead of being a weakness, turned out to be a feature, contributing to the matter-of-factness of the narrative, a quality that a Shaker might compliment as being very “plain.” That plainness leant a raw efficiency and authenticity to the carefully crafted scenes and dialog, allowing the unvarnished personalities of the characters to shine on their own.

In short, Plainsong is a down-to-earth tale of ordinary human struggles presented in a delightful and immersive way. I found it to be a refreshing departure from novelistic norms.

4.4/5 stars

Frederic Martin