We’ve waited a long time for an invitation back to Holt, the fictional town in eastern Colorado that’s home to Kent Haruf’s novels. Somehow, a decade has slipped by since he published “Eventide.” A whole new generation of readers doesn’t know “Plainsong,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999. Besides writing well and sometimes even selling well, Haruf does nothing to keep himself in the news. You won’t see him tweeting with Colson Whitehead or showing off his breakfast nook for the Times’ Sunday Styles section. Shy and humble, residing light-years away from those Brooklyn sophisticates, Haruf may be the most muted master in American fiction: our anti-Franzen. Haruf’s five novels are as plain and fortifying as steel-cut oatmeal: certified 100-percent irony-free, guaranteed to wither magic realism, stylistic flourishes and postmodern gimmicks.
His new novel, “Benediction,” makes a stray reference to the two old brothers in “Eventide,” and fans will feel familiar back in Holt, but Haruf is working now with a fresh constellation of characters. In a structure reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” Haruf moves through several story lines that sometime intersect as these people, young and old, go about the daily business of small-town life.
But death is the axis of “Benediction.” In the opening pages, Dad Lewis — everybody has called him “Dad” for decades — gets bad news from his doctor: “He would be dead before the end of summer,” Haruf writes. “By the beginning of September the dirt would be piled over what was left of him out at the cemetery three miles east of town. Someone would cut his name into the face of a tombstone and it would be as if he never was.”
The clear-eyed starkness of those lines never wavers as we watch Dad slow down over the next few months and finally die in his own bed at home in the company of Mary, his wife of more than 50 years, and Lorraine, their daughter. The mechanics of hospice care for an old man can make grim reading, of course, but Haruf is no more interested in the pornography of cancer than he is in the sentimentality of illness. Mary and Lorraine do the best they can to make Dad comfortable and prepare themselves for his absence. Sometimes, they tear up — so will you — but mostly, they’re just as stoic and spare as the lines of this quiet novel.
Uncomfortable but reluctant to use the opiates that a visiting nurse brings to the house, Dad is beyond small talk or empty politeness. There’s no gallows humor here, but Dad realizes that he can eat what he wants now and that he’ll never have “to paint the iron fence again.” What matters to him in these final months is settling his accounts as a husband, a father and proprietor of the town’s hardware store. Some of his memories are painful, particularly now that the time for redemption is so short.
Hardworking and inflexibly righteous, Dad is “a man you could set your clock by,” but that rigidity could draw blood, too. We see him punishing a dishonest employee and later reacting cruelly to his son’s homosexuality — moments that still haunt him despite his best efforts to make amends.
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