PLAINSONG Response 2

I just finished “Plainsong,” and it was amazing. Okay, yeah, I’m impressed, and that is hard to do. I had to say that. Most novels that fall under the elite genre of literature that I pickup seem to have a very sad, life is crap angle to them. Depressing stuff really, no hope, humanity is worthless, and I come out the other side of several hundred pages thinking, why I get up in the morning. However, “Plainsong” is very full of hope, if in a very dust-bowl State kind of way.

Looking at the cover, “Painsong” was a National Book Award Finalist in 1999, loosing to “Waiting” by Ha Jin. Strange thing, I was looking though the December issue of Esquire and “Plainsong” is listed in The Esquire Canon (Abridged), on page 28 of the magazine. I can’t really say what that means about the quality of the book or what I’m reading, other than it is a damn good read and a lot of others think so too.

In Response 1, I talked about one of the parallelisms that were running though the chapters that bounce back and forth between the main characters. By the end of the book I noticed another significant one, between the Ike and Bobby chapters and the McPherons chapters. Ike and Bobby are nice and ten years old and brothers. They are very close. They do everything together. They even share deep silences together. The McPherons are in their late fifties. They are brothers. They farm together. They have lived only with themselves since their parents died and left the family farm to them (that is until Victoria came into their lives).

The way that these two sets of brothers act, talk, and interact with other is almost identical. It seems that the story is suggesting that the way Ike and Bobby are now was the way that the McPherons were and that the McPherons are Ike and Bobby’s future. I’m probably stretching that, but it seems like a possibility and that possibility is a craft tool that I really must acquire.

The last parallelisms that I want to make note of is death and birth. And now that I think of it, perhaps juxtaposition would have been a better term than parallelism. In the last chapters, Ike and Bobby experience a lot of death. One of their two horses dies a painful death from a twisted gut. They watched on as the local veterinarian performed an autopsy, cutting the horse’s ribs with hedge clippers. It deeply affected them. Then, they find one of their older paper route customers dead in her chair in her living room.

The birth that takes place is of Victoria’s baby girl. This birth brings the McPherons a great joy. However, before the baby is born it is in Victoria’s womb. Right after finding the old lady dead, Ike and Bobby find their way out to the McPherons to see the pregnant girl. It is as if Ike and Bobby are seeking out a miracle, something good to offset the bad.

The effect that all this has on me as a writer is one of awe. The life and death thing is very cliché, really, but in the way that Haruf presents it, you’d never know. Instead of being cliché, it is touching and makes perfect sense. Now it is my job, as student of writing and as an author, to try to drill down to nuts and bolts of the craft driving all of this and replicate it in my own work.

Wish me luck.

Haruf, Kent. Plainsong. New York: Vintage, 1999

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