I’ve taken to posting reviews on Goodreads, initially as a way of simply keeping a record of what I’ve read. Soon, though, I was writing more about the books: main characters, plot synopses, observations about the writing style, my own reactions. They were turning into little book reviews. Jeri suggested I create an archive of them here on my website. So here are two recent pieces about books by the wonderful Kent Haruf.

BENEDICTION

Dad Lewis (everyone in the town of Holt, Colorado, calls him Dad) has just received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. After the drive back home from Denver across the high plains, he and his wife Mary sit out on the porch, shortly after sundown.

Well. That’s it, he said. That’s the deal now. Isn’t it.
He might be wrong. They’re wrong sometimes, she said. They can’t be so sure.
I don’t want to let myself think that way. I can feel it in me that they’re right. I don’t have much time left.
Oh I don’t want to believe that.
Yeah. But I’m pretty sure that’s how it’s going to be.
I don’t want you to go yet, she said. She reached across and took his hand. I don’t. There were tears in her eyes. I’m not ready.
I know. … We better call Lorraine pretty soon, he said.
I’ll call her.
Tell her she doesn’t have to come home yet. Give her some time.
He looked at the beer bottle and held it in front of him and took a small drink.

Haruf writes wonderful dialogue, but in Benediction never uses quotation marks or dashes or italics to set off the spoken words from their surroundings. After you get used to it, it feels natural for this story, creating a kind of dreamlike haze, blurring the lines between speech and thought, narration and description, perhaps suggesting a sense of unreality—or heightened reality—as death approaches. The language is simple and beautiful. There is nobility in the main characters: Dad and Mary; their daughter Lorraine; Dad’s long-time employees at the hardware store, Rudy and Bob; the eight-year-old girl Alice and her grandmother Berta May next door; the old woman Willa Johnson and her unmarried daughter Alene who live in a blue-roofed house out in the country; the young pastor Lyle; the hospice nurse. They seem to know the right things to say or do to provide comfort.

But they make mistakes, too. Each has suffered heartbreak, and Haruf is unsparing in his flashbacks to several scenes of violence and brutality. A key theme is the relationships between parents and children. Pastor Lyle, grappling with his own crisis of vocation, throws up his hands at the rages and deceptions of his son John Wesley, a story that somewhat parallels that of Dad, who failed, years earlier, to provide the refuge and understanding his son Frank desperately needed as a high schooler. Frank is now completely estranged from his parents. They don’t know where he is and hold out hope that somehow he will show up to see his father before he dies. Dad feels deep guilt about not only this, but other decisions he’s made in the past. He has done his best over the years to make amends. The poignancy and compassion of this beautiful novel are heightened by the knowledge that Haruf himself died the year after it was published.

WHERE YOU ONCE BELONGED

I feel sure I read this book before, but didn’t remember the details. It’s a page-turner, perfectly paced, not too long, easy to finish in one evening. At its center is an outsized character, Jack Burdette, a high school football hero in his small Colorado town, the life of the party at the local bars, but corrupt at his core, unconcerned about anyone but himself, with not an ounce of remorse for any suffering he might leave in his wake. The local newspaperman, Pat Arbuckle, tells the story. He writes “I had known Jack Burdette all his life. Or all of it, that is, except for the four years in the early 1960s when he was in the army and in Holt and I was in college and then again later for those eight years after he had disappeared when no one in Holt knew him. … We had grown up together. For a long time I had even liked him.” The book is like a tall tale, with some hilarious slapstick episodes, and a kind of delicious exasperation in the depictions of a small town’s judgmental cruelties, but the tragedies are wrenching and real, most upsetting because the damage falls on innocents. It wrung me out. Powerful stuff.