Is this my last blog entry? I’ll get to that question later: first, my choice of re-reading from the not-so-distant year of 2016, when my records show that I read 36 books.* Having currently no library access, I’ve had to select something from that 36 that was on our shelves at home; I’ve gone for Kent Haruf, and his 2004 novel Eventide.
I can remember buying my second-hand copy of Eventide from a shop on Franklin Street, Brooklyn, just round the corner from where Clever Daughter no 1 and her husband were then living. We had gone there to stay with them and wait for a granddaughter to be born, and as the baby was in no hurry to arrive we seemed to have lots of time on our hands for reading, eating and drinking. Surviving as a bookmark in my copy is a till receipt from a local supermarket dated a few days after the said granddaughter’s birth: milk, potatoes, beef, onions, grapes, bananas, kettle chips and something the receipt describes as ‘FARMER’S DIRECT ORGANIC BABY $2.99’. I’m not sure what that was.
Anyway, back to the book. How familiar to the average reader is Haruf? He published just six novels: he was born and died in Colorado (his dates are 1943–2014), and though he moved around a bit – he had a stint teaching English as a Peace Corps volunteer in Turkey – he deserves the tag ‘regional American writer’. All his books are set in and around the fictional small Colorado town of Holt, which seems to be in the eastern, flatter part of the state (i.e. not the Rockies) and within driving distance of non-fictional places such as Denver and Fort Collins. Eventide is a sort of sequel to Plainsong (1999), which I had read a few years previously, and features some of the same characters, notably Raymond and Harold McPheron, two brothers sharing their life on a farm where they breed cattle. Here they are at the very beginning of the novel, ‘Old men approaching an old house at the end of summer’, with the single mother who has been living with them but is about to leave them to go to college:
They came on across the gravel drive past the pickup and the car parked at the hogwire fencing and came one after the other through the wire gate. At the porch they scraped their boots on the saw blade sunken in the dirt, the ground packed and shiny around it from long use and mixed with barnyard manure, and walked up the plank steps onto the screened porch and entered the kitchen where the nineteen-year-old girl Victoria Roubideaux sat at the pinewood table feeding oatmeal to her little daughter. (p.3)
Well, that’s the Haruf style: a Hemingwayesque flatness – characteristically, six ands in two sentences – combined with observed details that can sometimes be overdone but mostly feel right.
Rather like (but shorter than) a complicated nineteenth-century novel, Eventide follows the lives of a number of other people alongside the McPherons and Victoria over a year or so, some of them only slightly intersecting with the McPherons and Victoria. There’s Luther and Betty June Wallace and their two children, living in a squalid trailer and barely getting by on food stamps; their social worker Rose Tyler; Hoyt Raines, Betty June’s sinister uncle; 11-year-old DJ Kephart, living with and looking after his grandfather Walter, who was once a ‘gandy dancer on the railroad in southern Wyoming’ (I had to look that up: it means ‘section hand’ or railway navvy); husbandless Mary Wells and her two daughters, near neighbours of the Kepharts; assorted teachers, bar habitués and other Holt inhabitants.
It’s the dialogue as much as anything that makes Haruf readable (despite his aversion to using quote marks). For instance here’s part of a chapter where Raymond and Walter find themselves in the same hospital room:
I read about you in the paper. I’m sorry to hear about your loss.
The woman that wrote that didn’t even know the half of what she was saying, Raymond said.
My name’s Kephart, the old man said. Walter Kephart. They tell me I got pneumonia.
Is that right.
That’s what they’re telling me.
You look like you got some good help there with you anyway.
Too good, the old man said. This boy here keeps telling me what to do all the time.
Well, it’s nice having a young person around … (p.101)
One of the reviews quoted in my paperback talks of Haruf’s novel being ‘compassionate’, but ‘dispassionate’ would be more like it, I think. Part of the point of his style is that everyone is seen from the outside, as if in a movie: we are privy to no one’s internal thoughts and people’s characters emerge out of what they simply say and do. (The few ‘interior’ moments in the book seem to involve Raymond: for instance, when he and Victoria’s boyfriend ‘stood looking at her … [and] they both felt at once awkward and speechless in the presence of such beauty’ (p.233), or when he drives home late in the story and ‘by the time he turned off the highway onto the gravel road he was thinking again about Rose Tyler’ (p.268))
I think Haruf’s style (and that of some other present-day writers) shows a perhaps unconscious influence from film and television narratives: not only the seen-from-outside aspect but also the quick cutting from one ‘scene’ to another and the reliance on dialogue to convey character. And you know the way films often end with the camera pulling out to a wide shot, with the protagonist(s) diminishing in size as more of their surrounding landscape or townscape is seen? Several of Eventide’s chapters end in this pulling-out-to-distance kind of way – for instance when Hoyt hitches a ride to escape from the town:
The highway stretched out before them, lined on both sides by the shallow barrow ditches. Above the ditches the four-strand barbed-wire fences ran along beside the pastures in the flat sandy country, and above the fences the line of telephone poles rose up out of the ground like truncated trees strung together with black wire. Hoyt rode with him through Norka and as far as Brush. Then he got another ride and traveled on, headed west on a Monday morning in springtime. (p.274)
I would have thought that Eventide, its predecessor Plainsong and other Haruf novels might translate easily to a movie or TV series, but although Plainsong has been adapted for the stage, only one of his novels seems to have been turned into a screen narrative. That novel is Haruf’s last, Our Souls at Night, which I’ve also just read – for the first time – straight after Eventide. Published posthumously, in 2015, it’s a much slighter novel, about the relationship between two 70-something neighbours, and was recently turned into a fairly-well-reviewed Netflix movie starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. I think those two are just too glamorous for the novel’s main characters, but maybe I should watch it all the same.
So there you are: Kent Haruf is certainly worth reading, in my opinion. As have most of the 40 re-readings** I’ve chosen from my list, started in 1977, of books I’ve read or partly read. Back in January 2017, when I started this blog and declared that my aim was ‘to take one book from every year, re-read it and make appropriate or irrelevant comment thereon’ I hardly thought I’d get to the end of my project – ‘Forty books at the rate of one per month means more than three years’ worth of re-reading; whether I last the course, time will tell,’ I wrote – still less did I think I’d end it in the isolation we now find ourselves in. Given the time I’ve now got for reading, should I convert this to a normal what-I-have-been-reading blog? Answers welcome.
* I didn’t include in my list include anything read as part of my part-time philosophy MA that year, for an essay on morality and evolution and for a dissertation on random selection.
**For what it’s worth, of the 40 authors I’ve re-read, 21 have been British (that includes two Scottish and one Welsh writer); 12 North American (one of which is Canadian); three Irish; two Russian; one Australian; and one unclassifiably European (Joseph Roth). Of these, 27 were men and 13 women. I should have made more of an effort towards gender balance, I suppose – also to have included more translations …
Old geezer re-reading 