Review by New York Times Review
A NOVELIST once told me that he had given up writing journalism on the side because "in journalism they only let you tell one story: Something Has Changed." Maybe so - but is it any different in fiction? Writing workshop nostrums stress the need for conflict, but the stuff of most novels is not conflict so much as change: the change in a character; the change in several characters' views of one another or the past; the ways characters respond to changes in their surroundings. Kent Haruf's novels - "The Tie That Binds," "Where You Once Belonged," "Plainsong," "Eventide" and now "Benediction" - present slices from life in the fictional town of Holt, Colo., and they defy our expectation that literature rooted in a particular place should show how the place is changing. Where the small town in fiction is generally depicted as under threat - by progress, by callous outsiders, by war or disease, by feuds among the inhabitants, by the march of time - Haruf depicts Holt as a town serenely off the grid. It can be hard to tell in which decade - in which century - the novels take place. Oh, there are clues here and there. A woman is seen "doing something to herself, inserting something," before she goes to bed with a man. ("You didn't need to do that, he said. I've been cut.") But change doesn't loom like a new Walmart on the edge of town. Ranchers ride horses, raise cattle, deliver newborn calves and scrape "their boots on the saw blade sunken in the dirt, the ground packed and shiny around it from long use and mixed with barnlot manure." A father cooks eggs in a cast-iron skillet for his sons, who deliver newspapers on their bicycles. The characters speak a split-grain English. Asked how she's doing, a weary mother replies: "I'm still above ground. . . . Every day above ground is a good day, isn't it." Nights, two unmarried old brothers who run a ranch turn on "the old console television to catch whatever news there might be showing from somewhere else in the world." All this would be off-putting were it not so artfully stylized, and were it not the context for stories of dramatic changes in the lives of the people of Holt. In "Plainsong," those brothers take in a pregnant young woman as a daughter of sorts, and in "Eventide," the townspeople rally to protect a family from an uncle who has lost his way. In "Benediction" change comes to Holt from the world outside, in the person of a firebrand minister from Denver. Working in his characteristic style - short sentences, short chapters and a round-robin point of view, with much ado about the weather - Haruf makes this story the subplot of the novel rather than the plot, a decision that renders "Benediction" an affecting but transitional work, a deft piece of fictional joinery. The plot, if it can be called that, is the death, from cancer, of Dad Lewis, proprietor of the local hardware store. Dad isn't a likable character and he knows it. When his wife, Mary, briefly hospitalized for stress (the term is not used) over the burden of caring for him, checks out and walks home, "clear across town," he tells her: "If you keep this up, I'm going to die right now and not put it off any longer, just to keep you from doing this again." Dad Lewis is what once was called an upright man, and as he expires we see the consequences of his uprightness. A store clerk he discovered stealing from "the hardware" and forced to leave town later killed himself, and for years Dad supported the man's wife and children. His son, Frank, was bullied for his homosexuality. Early on, Dad challenged him: "What are you anyway?" Frank replied: "I'm just your boy. That's all I am." Violence followed, and then remorse, and Frank wound up in the city, dead to his father. The minister who comes to town, Rev. Rob Lyle, is likewise a man of uprightness. Ousted from a church in Denver for speaking in support of a "preacher who came out homosexual," he is sent to Holt, and soon he stirs things up at the Community Church. You think the gears of plot are turning: decades after Dad Lewis lashed out at his son, he will get his comeuppance. But Haruf is too subtle a writer to dovetail his stories so cleverly. In Holt, Reverend Lyle doesn't preach for gay rights; he proposes that the United States should "turn the other cheek" instead of going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq: "I want to say to you here on this hot July morning in Holt, what if Jesus wasn't kidding? What if he wasn't talking about some never-never land? What if he really did mean what he said 2,000 years ago?" For this, the congregants scorn him. His wife says she has had enough. Their son tries to take his own life. Reverend Lyle up and leaves the ministry. The story obviously takes place in the years after 9/11. With it Haruf dispels the image of Holt as a place outside the stream of current affairs, and with it he complicates the common notion of small towns as oppressively religious and thick with tradition. Here the minister is a city man and a figure of progress, not reaction. Here religion is a challenge to the old ways, which are agricultural and mercantile. The nearest thing to ritual is a transaction at the hardware store - "that little bit of commerce between me and another fellow on a summer morning at the front counter," Dad Lewis recalls. Transcendence is found when females ages 8 to 80 go skinny-dipping in the stock tank where the farm animals cool off. Death, when it comes for Dad Lewis, is cloudy and dim: a memory of his parents, a last quarrel with his son, an empty chair in the front room. THE titles of Haruf's books suggest the religious grandeur of what one character calls "the precious ordinary." Plainsong is a monastic chant; eventide is the old term for evening that figures in the spiritual "Abide With Me"; a benediction (an epigraph informs us) is "the utterance of a blessing, an invocation of blessedness." It's a lovely effect, but here it calls attention to how little we come to know about Reverend Lyle: what led him to speak up for gay people back in Denver and against war here in Holt, what led him to quit the ministry so abruptly. Was it a struggle over his own sexuality? A desperate attempt to save his marriage? A lapse in faith that wasn't that strong in the first place? Haruf hints at Reverend Lyle's motives but leaves things there, as if withholding the full story for some later installment. The minister would be worth knowing because the challenges he faces, living in this small town, are akin to the ones the novelist faces in writing about it. What is change worth, and how can it be brought about convincingly? When is change truly dramatic, and when is it disruptive, histrionic? When is leaving certain things unspoken a reflection of good manners, and when is it evasion? When is the aversion to change a form of fidelity to home truths, and when is it a form of timidity, an opportunity that's been allowed to pass? It may be that Haruf plans to round out Reverend Lyle's story with another novel in what is taking shape as a cycle of works, like Louise Erdrich's Dakota novels or the Texas plays of Horton Foote. "Benediction" suggests there's no end to the stories Haruf can tell about Holt or to the tough, gorgeous language he can summon in the process. But the prospect of another novel suggests the drawback of this one: like the characters, it's genuine but incomplete, dependent on its companions and surroundings. Paul Elie is the author of "The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage." His most recent book is "Reinventing Bach."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 10, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* From the terroir and populace of his native American West, the author of Plainsong (1999) and Eventide (2004) again draws a story elegant in its simple telling and remarkable in its authentic capture of universal human emotions. The last, dying days of old Dad Lewis supply the framework for this sober yet reverberant novel. Dad owns a store in a small Colorado town, and his terminal illness draws out the compassion of his adult daughter, whom Dad wants to take over his business upon his imminent passing, and sparks an arousal in his long-devoted wife to seek some degree of resolution to an unhealed family wound. Dad's closing days also stir emotions in other town residents who are in Dad's realm of acquaintances, including the girl who moved in next door to stay with her grandmother and whose memories of her deceased mother remain raw; the new minister in town who suddenly rebels against the reluctance of his congregation to think about new ideas; and a mother and daughter, the former advanced in years and the latter now in middle age, who still confront traits in each other that they would just as soon not see.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Holt, the fictional Colorado town where all of Haruf's novels are set, longtime resident Dad Lewis is dying of cancer. Happily married (he calls his wife "his luck"), Dad spends his last weeks thinking over his life, particularly an incident that ended badly with a clerk in his store, and his relationship with his estranged son. As his wife and daughter care for him, life goes on: one of the Lewises' neighbors takes in her young granddaughter; an elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter visit with the Lewises, with each other, and with the new minister, whose wife and son are unhappy about his transfer to Holt from Denver. Haruf isn't interested in the trendy or urban; as he once said, he writes about "regular, ordinary, sort of elemental" characters, who speak simply and often don't speak much at all. "Regular and ordinary" can equate with dull. However, though this is a quiet book, it's not a boring one. Dad and his family and neighbors try, in small, believable ways, to make peace with those they live among, to understand a world that isn't the one in which they came of age. Separately and together, all the characters are trying to live-and in Dad's case, to die-with dignity, a struggle Haruf (Eventide) renders with delicacy and skill. Agent: Nancy Stauffer Cahoon, Nancy Stauffer Associates. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
After the critical and popular success of Plainsong and its sequel, Eventide, Colorado native Haruf returns to his fictional town of Holt, on the high plains of eastern Colorado. As Dad Lewis, a central figure in the community, lies dying, he looks out from his bedroom window over the familiar wheat fields and pastures dotted with black cattle. His wife, Mary, is constantly by his side, and daughter Lorraine has left a lackluster romance in Denver to come help. Only the Lewises' relationship with their absent son, Frank, clouds Dad's blessed life. Numerous neighbors stop by to keep Dad's spirits up despite being burdened with their own cares. Rev. Lyle's heartwarming stories of people he's helped cover up a dark past. The Johnson women, mother Willa and daughter Alene, appear dull and unremarkable, but Alene hides an intense loneliness stemming from a passionate affair with a married man. As Dad's life slips away, these neighbors forge indelible bonds. -VERDICT Haruf captures the sadness and hardship, the joys and triumphs behind the lives of ordinary people. Benediction has an understated Our Town quality that's all the more powerful in the hands of this master storyteller. This is exceptional fiction not to be missed. [See Prepub Alert, 9/10/12.]-Donna Bettencourt, Mesa County Libs., Grand Junction, CO (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A meditation on morality returns the author to the High Plains of Colorado, with diminishing returns for the reader. As the clich has it, Haruf caught lightning in a bottle with his breakthrough novel, Plainsong (2000), an exploration of moral ambiguity in the small community of Holt. With his third novel with a one-word title set in Holt, the narrative succumbs to melodrama and folksy wisdom as it details the death of the owner of the local hardware store, a crusty feller who has seen his own moral rigidity soften over the years, though not enough to accomplish a reconciliation with his estranged son, a boy who was "different" and needed to escape "from this little limited postage stamp view of things. You and this place both." Or so the dying man, known to all as "Dad" Lewis, imagines his son saying, as the possibility of the son's impending return before the father's inevitable death provides a pulse of narrative momentum. Other plotlines intertwine: A minister reassigned from Denver for mysterious reasons has trouble adjusting with his family to small-town Holt; an 8-year-old girl next door, who lost her mother to breast cancer, receives support from a neighboring mother and her adult daughter (single after a scandalous affair); Dad's own daughter has a boyfriend who isn't worthy of her. It's a novel that seems to suggest that it takes a village to raise a dysfunctional family, yet things somehow work themselves out. In a small town, "[n]othing goes on without people noticing," yet they often miss what the outsider minister poetically observes is "[t]he precious ordinary" of life in the community. Or perhaps life in general. The death of Dad has dignity and gravitas, but too much leading up to it seems like contrived plotline filler. Between one character's insistence that "[e]verything gets better" and another's belief that "[a]ll life is moving through some kind of unhappiness," the novel runs the gamut of homespun philosophizing. Even the epiphanies seem like reheated leftovers.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
