The characters never seem to stop talking, often while sitting - in bed, at a table, on the couch - rather than doing something, triangulating the moment.
The trouble here is too much of a good thing. With understated language and startling emotional insight, Haruf makes you feel awe at even the most basic of human gestures. In the back office of a hardware store, a woman opens up her coat and offers her naked body to the manager who would fire her husband. A daughter cleans her father with a warm washcloth and helps him into a diaper. Haruf is the master of what one of his characters calls "the precious ordinary." A minister at the pulpit speaks his mind about the war in Iraq and infuriates his congregation, and they shove their way from their pews and abandon the church while he sings half a hymn on his own. Dad Lewis is the central character, and from the very first line we know how the novel will end: The doctor asks him to sit down and tells him his cancer has progressed - and so the novel becomes a ticking clock, a long goodbye. This month, Haruf completes his Holt trilogy with Benediction (Knopf, $26), a sad, sweet novel that is a long way from perfect but forgivably so. There are few exceptions, few "perfect" novels, but Kent Haruf's first Holt novel, Plainsong (1999), is one of them, with unadorned language and equilateral structure that match the simple beauty of a country quilt. It's as if Haruf were a clear-eyed preacher holding up his hands and speaking calmly and plainly about what makes life worth living. Some of them are worn down by divorce and death and money troubles, but in the face of hardship they remain capable of grace. People try to go about their lives quietly, mending fences, drinking iced tea on the porch, making change across the scarred counter at the hardware store. The winters are too cold, the summers too hot, and everyone knows everyone's business. I feel something similar about Holt, Colorado, the stage for much of Kent Haruf's fiction. The banker shakes the hand of the farmer and says, "Peace." The organ brays, and the congregation rises and struggles to match its voice with the key.
And though I don't sing the hymns and I don't raise my hand during the sharing of joys and concerns, I still take pleasure in the sense of togetherness and ritual and hopefulness.
The brick walls shield me from the noise and chaos of the world, and I find a stillness there I can't locate anywhere else, except maybe deep in a forest. I am not a religious man, but sometimes I go to church.
0 kommentar(er)
