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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780375705854
ISBN number: 0375705856
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 301
Printing Date: August 22, 2000
Publishing house: Vintage
Sale Popularity Level: 20910
Studio: Vintage
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
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 bachelour 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
Amazon.com:
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 bachelour 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 grey 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
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Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers -
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.
Rated by buyers -
"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 very 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.
Rated by buyers -
wILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN WHY THE BOYS PUT THEIR MOTHER'S BRACELET AND THE COINS ON THE RAILROAD TRACKS? tHIS IS A WONDERFUL NOVEL...JUST A QUESTION ABOUT THAT EPISODE. THANKS
Rated by buyers 
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I was surprised at the aclaim this book has received. It' s ok for a little entertainment. I feel like I can get up from reading this, turn on the tv and watch a Lifetime or Hallmark channel movie without even knowing the difference. The mean characters in this book are so mean as not to be believed and the nice characters are saints. Where is the nuance?
A different writer who also writes in plain prose deservedly won the National Book Award the year this was nominated - Ha Jin for Waiting. Years later, I am still thinking about that book. This one will keep my attention while I read it, but it will be gone tomorrow.
Why do contemporary readers have such a taste for sentimentality?
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