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 Kent Haruf’s
Plainsong is set in the fictitious town of Holt, Colorado where everyone knows everyone's business before that business even happens. In a way, that's true of the book, too. Tom Guthrie, a high-school history teacher in small Holt, Colorado, is left to raise his two young sons, Ike and Bobby, alone when his wife abandons them. Victoria
Roubideaux, a high-school senior, discovers that a meaningless summer romance has left her pregnant and her unsympathetic mother turns her out of her home. Harold and Raymond
McPheron, two aging but self-reliant cattle ranchers, are haunted by what they may have missed in life by electing never to get married Haruf tells their stories simultaneously finally drawing all of his characters together in an improbable family of their own making.
Victoria turns to Maggie Jones, a compassionate teacher and a neighbor, for help. Maggie places Victoria with the McPheron brothers, an arrangement that Guthrie, a friend of both Maggie and the
McPherons, supports. The lonely brothers and Victoria begin to adapt to each other and then, over the course of Victoria's pregnancy, to form a resilient family unit. Harold and Raymond's growing affection for Victoria gives her a sense of self-worth. Tom and his sons quietly struggle to deal with their differing feelings of loss, guilt, and abandonment. Everyone is struggling here, and it's their decency, and their determination to care for one another that gets them through.
Kent Haruf on Plainsong
"Plainsong—the unisonous vocal music used in the Christian church from the earliest times; any simple and unadorned melody or
air"-- epigraph from Kent Haruf’s Plainsong.
“That kind of music is sung in unison by a group of people without accompaniment, so it seemed to
fit in the sense that I’m trying to tell the stories of seven or eight people at once, and I’m trying to advance them simultaneously But the music is plain and unadorned, and I think the style of the book is somewhat like that: stark and deliberately direct.
It is a quiet book; I made a conscious decision early on in thinking about it that I wanted to try to tell a story that seemed believable, that seemed plausible, that wasn’t dependent on violence or unnecessary sex to advance its story—that the story was advanced more in the way ordinary lives are.
I was attempting to give a story about people that I thought were genuinely good people who were beset by problems, and I wanted to see how they would solve those problems—“
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