Plainsong - Kent Haruf (Plainsong #1)

Plainsong was the September book for discussion in the Deliberate Reader Book Club.  After the train wreck that August's book, The Diamond Age: or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer was, I was glad to see that something was going to be a bit more, ah, tuned down.  The story of a small town in Colorado seemed like that would fit the bill.

This is definitely a character-driven book focusing on a handful of people in the town of Holt, Colorado.  The book also tries to be artsy, by doing one of those things where the author is apparently too good for dialogue punctuation marks.  I find that extremely irritating, and it almost made me put down the book; I only continued reading it because I wanted to be able to take part in the discussion in case anything interesting came up.

The main characters in Holt are Guthrie, his sons Ike and Bobby, and teenager Victoria.  Other characters are the McPheron brothers and Maggie, and occasionally Gutrhie's wife Ella.  Guthrie is a teacher and Ella is depressed and their marriage is falling apart, which clearly impacts their children.  Guthrie is also dealing with a troublesome student in his school.  Victoria, on the other hand, is pregnant from a boy she was seeing over the summer and who has since ditched her, and her mother throws her out of the house and casts her adrift on the town's mercies.

I greatly preferred Victoria's part of the book to any of the other characters.  Watching her adjust to her new life and slowly building a relationship with the McPheron brothers was a real example of character growth, as opposed to Guthrie who seemed to be just running in place.  Ike and Bobby didn't interest me much and their parts mostly seemed like filler, just to show that there were children involved to begin with.  I actually did like Ella; though she's not very present and doesn't seem like a good mother, I could empathize with what was her struggle with depression.  It wasn't that she didn't want to be a good wife or mother or functional human being in her own right, because she clearly did, but she just couldn't.  And she knew that remaining in Holt wasn't going to help her, so she had to leave.  I liked that Haruf didn't seem to shame her for this, but just portrayed it as it was.

One thing to keep in mind is that there's not much of a plot here to follow; this is evidently a series, though it's a strange book to be a series, and there might be some sort of large, overarching plot involved across the multiple books, but there's nothing really driving the story forward as an episodic story in this single volume.  This means that, while some of the people were enjoyable to read about, the book wasn't riveting.  I could put it down easily and sometimes found myself paging ahead to find out when Victoria's next section would begin.  And honestly, the cover here seems perfect for the book: dim and gray, much like Holt and the book itself, with Victoria's red purse and the McPherons' red cow being the only splashes of color in the whole book.

Overall, this was an enjoyable book for what it was, but I didn't find it to be anything extraordinary.  The lack of dialogue punctuation drove me to frustration--there's really no need for that.  I don't think I'll continue with the series, but it was fine for a book club book, and a welcome slowdown from last month's Book of Crazy.

3 stars out of 5.