Volume 46, Number 16 · October 21, 1999
Wearing Out the West
By Joyce Carol Oates
Plainsong
by Kent Haruf
Knopf, 301 pp., $24.00
Plainsong is an inspired title for this spare, uninflected novel, the third in a sequence of novels by Kent Haruf set in the high plains of Holt County, Colorado, approximately one hundred fifty miles due east of Denver. It's a 'song' of the plains recounted in a very plain style. ('Plainsong: the unisorous vocal music used in the Christian church from the earliest times; any simple and unadorned melody or air.') Northeastern Colorado isn't the West of spectacular Rocky Mountain vistas but a countryside of grim, featureless, and often arid distances. In Haruf's first novel, The Tie That Binds (1984), the Holt County region is described principally by what it was not, in the dismayed eyes of homesteaders pushing westward from Iowa in 1896:
Review, 3529 words
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