50 States of Literature: Heading On Down to Colorado

Kent Haruf’s book Plainsong is true to its namesake, a “simple and unadorned melody or air” that is tender in its portrayal of three families in Holt, Colo. Tom Guthrie, a local history teacher, must shield his young sons when his wife becomes clinically depressed. Victoria, a pregnant teenager, is evicted by her mother, and the McPheron brothers begin to reconsider their lifelong bachelorhood on their cattle farm. Tying them all together is Maggie Jones, a warm yet pragmatic teacher who is determined to make their lives intersect. Haruf molds his characters without judgment or hyperbole. Victoria, when asked why she had sex with a boy she barely knew, explains, “Once he said I had beautiful eyes.” When Maggie agrees that they are pretty, she replies, “But nobody ever told me.” Haruf manages to blend such achingly honest scenes with an environment both stark and nuanced, painting fall and winter in the Great Plains of Colorado as a land where “corral dust rose in the cold air ... like brown clouds of gnats” and the star-crowded sky looks “hard and pure.” Here, patches of snow sit among blue mounds of sandhill and dead sunflowers drop their loaded heads onto the black-top roads. In this atmosphere we find a land at once modernized and rural, brisk and dusty, where ice clings to the edge of sand-colored mountains.