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Do the people of Plainsong represent us?

Karen Madorin

I’ve been thinking about the people of Haruf’s fictional community of Holt, Colorado.

Is it just me, or is this an ugly place with some ugly people?

Look, for the first half of the novel, give or take a few pages, teenagers seem to have a lot of recreational yet rough sex, fathers prowl bars, a woman is harassed by a coworker, mothers abandon their children, teenagers bully each other and brawl with their teachers. Not a pretty picture.

But then, we are given Mrs. Stearns, the elderly shut-in, whose son died years previously in a war Haruf doesn’t name.  Mrs Stearns is a chain-smoking ancient on Ike and Bobby’s paper route. One afternoon, she teaches the boys to make oatmeal cookies.  She tells them, “If you can read, you can cook. You can always feed yourselves…not just here, but at home, too.” Useful advice, right?  But it’s poignant, isn’t it, that this lonely, isolated woman recognizes, as their father doesn’t, not until very late in the novel, that no one is around for Ike and Bobby, no one is at home to feed them, literally or metaphorically.

And the McPherons, the old bachelor brothers, who seem to represent all that is good in human nature, the ones who take in the homeless and pregnant Victoria, well, they don’t even appear until the middle of the novel. How is it that these rugged individualists, these old men (as Haruf calls them), offer hope for humanity?  In a forum post, it was asked why, in the last third of the novel, why, after they discover Mrs Stearns dead in her apartment, do Bobby and Ike seek out the McPherons? Why does Victoria want to stay with the McPherons?

I’m not sure this is the answer, but I do notice that most folks in Holt seem to be in flux,  their relationships, perhaps even their convictions, all the time shifting, changing, realigning, as they search for something or for someone.   In contrast, Mrs. Stearns and the McPherons seem grounded – rooted, we might say, to a particular place, rooted in caring for other people.  Yet – and this makes me feel sad—these elders seem, well, I’ll say it: idyllic; their values seem a little old-fashioned, don’t they? Will the ways of living that these elders represent will pass with the passing of those elders?    

What do you think about the people of Plainsong? Do they represent us well, we living breathing folks of the High Plains? Post your responses at our online forum, hosted by Rebecca Koehn, and available through our website at hpprradioreaders.org.