Wishing Makes It So Book

Colorado High Plains, image source:


Absence

Peek between the gaps to appreciate the pared-down beauty of this book. At its heart, is absence: the words not used, the thoughts not made explicit, the loved-ones left or lost, the open space in which it is set.

The language is plain, utilitarian, and unsentimental, as are the situations described in the short chapters.

There is no backstory, there are no inner monologues - indeed, most of the characters say little enough out loud (and when they do, there are no quotation marks) - and there are few suggestions as to what the future might hold. It is all rooted in the fickle but ubiquitous Colorado dust of the here and now (published in 1999, and maybe set a few years earlier).

Simplicity lends clarity and focus, but what lies beneath is more complex.

The story juxtaposes intolerable loss and cruelty with the amazing, unconditional generosity and love of virtual strangers.

Despite the pain, there is always tender, tentative hope: "They knew they were not out of the woods yet, but they allowed themselves to believe that what they saw ahead was at least a faint track leading to a kind of promising clearing." So many caveats in a single sentence.

Pairs

There is an unsettling sense of oscillation, uncertainty, precarious balance, because this is a book of pairs: twins and opposites, of people and situations - even pairs of pairs (Ike and Bobby Guthrie, the young brothers; Raymond and Harold McPheron, the old ones).

One pair are bemused by the many varieties of sugar, eggs, and oats in a shop, then in the next chapter, another pair are bemused by the permutations of cribs, mattresses, and bedding.

Windows are open and shaded. Two women withdraw from motherhood as another embarks on it, and childless people parent a mother. The pregnancy of cows is balanced with that of a young woman. Cruelty is counteracted with kindness. There is sleep and wakefulness, death and birth, light and dark, blood and beauty, and walking/pushing away versus being welcomed unconditionally.

Perhaps the ultimate pair is that of this book with its sequel, Eventide. They are two halves of the same story, set a couple of years apart, both woven around the delicate combination of pairs of similarity and difference. If you read Plainsong and enjoy it, I urge to read Eventide soon after, as I did. Benediction is separate, despite GR labelling it as #3. See my reviews:

• Eventide (follows on from this) 5*
• Benediction (a separate story) 5*

Sleep

The hypnotic beauty of the plain song is almost soporific. Almost.

Sleep is mentioned on the very first page, and is significant in almost every chapter for at least the first third of the book, and occasionally, but importantly, in the remainder. A crucial turning point - more than would ordinarily be the case - concerns the decision to buy a crib.

There are so many dilemmas and issues: where characters sleep; how they sleep; whether to wake someone; whether someone is really asleep or not; the dishevelled look on waking; using sleep as an excuse; using lack of sleep as an excuse; watching someone sleep. However, who people sleep with (and don't) is much less important.

A tired character looked "like some survivor of a train wreck or flood, the sad remnant from some disaster that had passed through and done its damage and gone on".

It's not just people: even the battered windows and screens of an abandoned house make it look "sleepy-eyed".

Individually these incidents are dismissible as quotidian, but taken together, they hint at something deeper: Holt is not a sleepy small town in the usual sense.

There are life-changing events for all the main characters, but they are never treated as big emotional dramas. Holt's citizens are troubled in many ways, and that is reflected in their night-time hours. When they're awake, they get on with life as best they can.

Maggie Jones

Her name may head only one chapter, but she's the benevolent puppeteer of most of the key characters. (The chapters each bear the title of the main character(s) concerned. All but two are: (Tom) Guthrie, Ike and Bobby (his sons), Victoria Roubideaux, and McPherons (elderly brothers). There is one each for Ella (Guthrie's wife) and Maggie Jones.)

She is the one who suggests the McPherons take in the pregnant teen, Victoria: "You solitary old bastards need somebody too… You're going to die someday without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway."

Then she steps back and leaves them to sort things out, not because she can't be bothered or doesn't care, but because she understands that's the most effective way.

Her involvement with Tom Guthrie is a similar combination of the forthright and passive.

Stoner

The McPheron brothers reminded me strongly of the eponymous character of my (joint) favourite novel, Stoner. If Stoner had followed his more likely destiny as a son of the soil, he would have been barely distinguishable from Harold and Raymond.

Quotes

Important things happen to the characters in Plainsong, but it's really about the atmosphere conjured by the landscape and language, rather than plot.

Haruf's style is perfect for dirt and dust, slanted light and shadow.

• "The sun was higher, the light beginning to slide down the ladder of the windmill brightening it, making rings of rose-gold."

• "The pickup lifted a powdery plume from the road and the suspended dust shone like bright flecks of gold in the sun."

• "Her hair had been dyed, built not recently: her hair was maroon, like no human natural colour anywhere."

• "The air was turning sharp, with a fall feeling of loneliness coming. Something unaccountable pending in the air."

• "You must be lonely."…… "They didn't know how to say anything about that."

• A pregnancy test packet with a picture of a "young honey-haired woman with the look of religious exaltation on her face and the sunshiny garden stretching out behind".

• "The flicker of light spilled out into the side yard, where it flickered ever more faintly in a kind of illuminated echo on the dirt and dry weeds."

• "Glancing out of the window toward the place where the sun shone aslant on a few bare trees risen up along the street. It looked cold and bleak outside."

• "The trees along the curb… still showed sunlight at the tops; in the slanting afternoon sun the trees cast the thinnest of shadows as though they had been sprayed onto the street and brown grass."

• "The empty house… The broken -down neglected locust trees, shaggy barked, the overgrown yard, the dead sunflowers grown up everywhere with their heads loaded and drooping, everything dry and brown now in the late fall, dust-coated, and the sunken house itself diminished and weathered."

• "The little front room where at any time day or night, her clothes had been discarded and draped over the anonymous furniture and where… bowels of shrinking drying food had been put down at random on the bare rug."

• "The sky had turned faint and wispy and the thin blue shadow had reached across the snow."

• "Her eyes still bore a kind of wounded fierceness, as though the sadness and anger were both just below the surface."

• "Only a thin violet band of light showed in the west on the low horizon.''

• "She acted as though she were happy… They watched her with their heads down and smiled when she said things."

• "They looked as stiff and motionless as… two lifelike statues of minor saints." (Note "minor".)

• Wind "crying around the house corners, heaving and whinging in the bare trees."

• "Too humbled and embarrassed to say what it was they wanted even if they could have said exactly what it was."

• "If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that. I'm not just talking about here. When you go home too."

• "The early dark of late December. The low sky closing down."

• "All flat and sandy, the stunted stands of trees at the isolated farmhouses… The winter wheat was the only real green."

• "The freckled shade of the trees… with the sun sliding down behind them."

(It's possible I've instinctively added some of the commas Haruf deliberately omitted.)

This is another book I loved, that I only knew about thanks to the review of a GR friend. Thank you, Steve.