| Plainsong | 
 enlarge | Author: Kent Haruf
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  458 reviews
Sales Rank: 16192
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 301
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 0375705856
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375705854
ASIN: 0375705856
Publication Date: August 22, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Some wear on book from reading, some spine creases, wear on binding and pages, we guarantee all purchases and ship all items via USPS mail.
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Amazon.com Review
Plainsong, according to Kent Haruf's epigraph, is "any simple and unadorned melody or air." It's a perfect description of this lovely, rough-edged book, set on the very edge of the Colorado plains. Tom Guthrie is a high school teacher whose wife can't--or won't--get out of bed; the McPherons are two bachelor brothers who know little about the world beyond their farm gate; Victoria Roubideaux is a pregnant 17-year-old with no place to turn. Their lives parallel each other in much the same way any small-town lives would--until Maggie Jones, another teacher, makes them intersect. Even as she tries to draw Guthrie out of his black cloud, she sends Victoria to live with the two elderly McPheron brothers, who know far more about cattle than about teenage girls. Trying to console her when she think she's hurt her baby, the best lie they can come up with is this: "I knew of a heifer we had one time that was carrying a calf, and she got a length of fencewire down her some way and it never hurt her or the calf." Holt, Colorado, is the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone's business before that business even happens. In a way, that's true of the book, too. There's not a lot of suspense here, plotwise; you can see each narrative twist and turn coming several miles down the pike. What Plainsong has instead is note-perfect dialogue, surrounded by prose that's straightforward yet rich in particulars: "a woman walking a white lapdog on a piece of ribbon," glimpsed from a car window; the boys' mother, her face "as pale as schoolhouse chalk"; the smells of hay and manure, the variations of prairie light. Even the novel's larger questions are sized to a domestic scale. Will Guthrie find love? Will Victoria run away with the father of her baby? Will the McPherons learn to hold a conversation? But in this case, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and Plainsong manages to capture nothing less than an entire world--fencing pliers, calf-pullers, and all. Kent Haruf has a gorgeous ear, and a knack for rendering the simple complex. --Mary Park
Product Description
"Ambitious, but never seeming so, Kent Haruf reveals a whole community as he interweaves the stories of a pregnant high school girl, a lonely teacher, a pair of boys abandoned by their mother, and a couple of crusty bachelor farmers. From simple elements, Haruf achieves a novel of wisdom and grace--a narrative that builds in strength and feeling until, as in a choral chant, the voices in the book surround, transport, and lift the reader off the ground."
-FROM THE CITATION FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
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| Customer Reviews: Read 453 more reviews...
An Interesting yet Simple Story November 20, 2008
This is one of those books that I finished questioning rather or not I liked it. There are many horrific events in this novel that I didn't enjoy reading, yet it is written in such a way that you are compelled to read more. And in continuing the story you are rewarded with some lovely acts of humanity.
For me, the overall theme of this book was finding one's self. There are two children and a teen that, through events mostly out of their control, are forced to grow up quickly, and in doing so find their true selves. Also the majority of adults in this story are put into scenarios where they must redefined who they truly are. The main characters in this book are rather likable. I especially loved the quirky old farm brothers. The villains, however, have no redeemable traits.
The authors simple writing style is quite inviting and he is able to almost seamlessly merge several different story lines. However his lack of quotation marks around the dialog drove me crazy and I didn't understand the meaning behind it. I also feel the story ended rather abruptly, leaving me unsatisfied. There is a followup book, "Eventide", that I will probably be checking out, though I can't say I am in a terrible rush to do so.
 The gift to be simple September 15, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Seldom was a book so well titled. Plains-song, the song of the high plains east of the Rockies. Plain-song, a simple story told exquisitely simply, using ordinary Anglo-Saxon words and quite devoid of purple passages. And plainsong, as in the worship of the early church, for Kent Haruf's portrait of the small-town life of rural America, though containing its share of stupidity and wrong, is in the end an act of worship.
The core cast is relatively small: a pregnant teenager, two middle-aged bachelors living on an isolated farm, a high-school teacher trying to bring up two sons more or less on his own, and one of his female colleagues. These few characters drive the plot. Nothing happens that is really earth-shattering, but it is special because it happens to THEM. They are the ones who make mistakes and must try to rectify them; they are the ones who reach out in unexpected ways to others, linking this collection of rounded but disparate individuals into a caring community.
Yet this is a book of contrasts. It can bring a lump to the throat with moments of warmth and kindness, but just when it risks getting sappy it takes a darker turn. The teacher who had seemed a pillar of strength is shown to have feet of clay; the teenager makes an almost disastrous choice on impulse; the young boys become victims of an act of wanton malice. The novel's theme and simple style should recommend it as a book for young adults, but the picture is by no means sanitized: the doctor offers the young woman the option of aborting her baby, and there are scenes involving drugs or promiscuity. Haruf's belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature is rooted in realism, and is the stronger for it.
One measure of the strength of this book is the degree to which it made me aware of its literary pedigree. There is an obvious debt to Thornton Wilder's play, OUR TOWN. And, moving westward, to WINESBURG, OHIO by Sherwood Anderson, GILEAD by Marilynne Robinson, or THE RED PONY by John Steinbeck. For me, these books stand as a personal touchstone for one of the richest and most humane strands of American writing. I am thrilled to be able to add Kent Haruf to such a list.
Just luminous. July 30, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I've read this book at least three times and its spare, delicate voice moves me every time. I feel myself connect with the characters, come to care about them, through the SPACE Haruf leaves with that language as simple as the Colorado plains (which I've visited a number of times, and they are as stripped and desolate as parts of the story are). Haruf's ability to juxtapose life's harshness (divorce, violent or natural death, getting bullied into growing up) with incredible tenderness, as with the Victoria-McGuthrie subplot, is remarkable. I adore this book, just adore it.
A Visit to Colorado July 24, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Plainson appears to be a narrative of a visit to a small town in Colorado. The author brings the reader into the ongoing lives of people. Characters and personalities are introduced. Everyone has their problems (maybe more than in some places)and they go about their lives. The reader leaves as unobtrusively as arriving. There is no resolution to the text (just as often happens in real life) except that maybe the presence of new life in the form of a baby binds people together in hope. There is the feeling that the story goes on. I thought the book started slowly and then found myself hooked. The author weaves the reader into the events so you can't wait to see what happens next. There is no climax in the plot - just good people and not so good people going about life in their own way. It remineded me of the play "Our Town". By the way, I did not read this book but listened to it on tape. The performance was superb. I would highly recommend it.
Quiet charm May 15, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up." This is the first line of Plainsong, a novel set in Holt, Colorado, a fictional town on the edge of the prairie. And it is quiet moments like this that are the joy of this book.
There are no unexpected plot twists in Plainsong. There is little action other than small-town fistfights. But it is a poetic and gentle and real. And it is surprising how much it draws you in. The characters are vivid and the dialogue is excellent. There is not an over-written word in the book.
The story is of the intertwining lives of several characters: a high-school teacher whose wife has become too depressed to leave bed but eventually finds the energy to leave him and his two sons; a pregnant high-school girl and the teacher who tries to help her; and two brothers who live on their farm 17 miles out of Holt and have little interest beyond their gates.
Plainsong was a deserving National Book Award finalist and an unlikely national bestseller. Describing the plot doesn't do it justice. You kind of just have to be there.
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