Benediction (Vintage Contemporaries)

When the big things in life happen, people often take stock and realize what really matters to them -- what people, what events, even what principles. When a big thing happens to a character of a novel, bringing the perfect tone to that taking stock -- and being able to show, rather than tell what really matters -- can make a sad story transcendent.That's what happens in Kent Haruf's Benediction. Dad Lewis has owned and operated the hardware store in a small high plains town for decades. He is now dying of cancer. His wife Mary is overdoing it and ends up in the hospital. She's one tough cookie -- she walks home after the enforced bedrest. But the Lewises are pragmatic and are the kind of people who naturally do the right thing. In this case, it's sending for their daughter, Lorraine, to come home from Denver to help and be with them.As in other Haruf novels, there are other small families and groups of people who enter the orbit of the main characters. Next door, Berta May's young granddaughter has come to live with her after the child's mother dies. Alice is a quiet little girl. Lorraine, who lost a daughter, is drawn to her, as are Alene, a teacher probably ready to retire, and her widowed mother, Willa.Also coming into the Lewis circle is the new preacher in town, fish-out-of-water Lyle, who has an unhappy wife and teenage son. He is a fascinating character -- someone who believes deeply in doing the right thing, but who is unable to communicate that belief or put it into action effectively. He was sent to the Lewises's small town after mucking things up in a bigger church. He's destined to repeat his mistake here.As Dad Lewis grows more ill and loses his strength, the biggest regret of his life is the estrangement of his son. Frank turned out differently from his father, and his father cast him aside in hurt and anger. Although Dad and Mary saw Frank after he left home, it's been years. Lorraine was in contact with him for a bit, but she also has lost touch.The depth of Dad Lewis's failure with his own son contrasts with the way he treated an employee who was stealing from the store. Dad fired him and told the man to leave town with his wife and kids. His wife offered herself to Dad in lieu of paying the money back and he turned her down. Months later, the man kills himself. Dad later found the young widow and kids, and helped them financially until she made a new life.It's the kind of punishment and assistance Dad was never able to give to his own son.The other characters also find ways in which to make up for the people who were taken from them, and for the things they were not able to do in the regular course of family events.There is a quiet strength in Haruf's prose that gives the smallest acts the grandeur of epic movements. One afternoon, Mary and Lorraine grant Dad's wish for a last drive around town. They park in front of the store and watch the normal business going on inside the store. A customer buys something and leaves: ... and then the man swung around and came out through the open doors onto the sidewalk with the paper sack in his hand, coming directly toward them in the car, so near that they could see the buttons on his summer shirt, before he turned and went up the block in the bright sun. Who was that, Daddy? I can't think of his name. But I know him. I'll think of it, he said. His voice sounded odd and then suddently he began to weep.Dad then has them drive him out to the country, where the reader learns what happened to the main characters in Haruf's beautiful novel, Plainsong. It resonates even for someone who hasn't read the novel since it first came out in 1999.This quiet strength works to great advantage in a major setpiece in the novel, when Lyle tries to deliver a homily about the Sermon on the Mount, and loving one's enemies. With the war on terrorism in full bloom, his sermon does not go well. Although Lyle's sermon does a wonderful job of explaining how there can be such a thing as a progressive believer in Christ in guiding how an individual can feel about both foreign and domestic policy -- ""And what if we tried it? What if we said to our enemies: We are the most powerful nation on earth. We can destroy you. ... But what if we say, Listen: Instead of any of these, we are going to give willingly and generously to you. We are going to spend the great American national treasure and the will and the human lives that we would have spent on destruction, and instead we are going to turn them all toward creation. We'll mend your roads and highways, expand your schools, modernize your wells, and water supplies, save your ancient artifcats and art and culture, preserve your temples and mosques. In fact, we are going to love you." -- the preacher's speech has a point about the way people act in everyday life as well: And so we know the satisfaction of hate. We know the sweet joy of revenge. How it feels to get even. Oh, that was a nice idea Jesus had. That was a pretty notion, but you can't love people who do evil. It's neither sensible nor practical. It's not wise to the world to love people who do such terrible wrong. ... what if Jesus wasn't kidding? ... What if he meant every word of what he said? What would the world come to?In Haruf's novel, time and unsought opportunities provide the chance to many of the characters perhaps not love their enemies, but to do good despite the evil or sad things that have been done to them. That characters in small towns living lives, but not of quiet desperation despite setbacks and heartache, would choose to carry on and do kind things for others, is in itself a benediction to the idea of a life well-lived. It is a way to seek goodness rather than evil, to seek the things that matter.

Holt, Colorado, is a very ordinary little town invented by Haruf for the setting of his three novels Plainsong, Eventide and Benediction. It’s the kind of sleepy, unattractive little place that we have all read about in literature and seen portrayed in endless films; the kind of place, in real life, you just couldn’t wait to get away from. And yet, this is what makes Haruf’s work so exceptional. He has the ability to make the ordinary into something completely extraordinary and creates a fictional place that you just can’t wait to get back to.Benediction tells the story of one long, hot summer in Holt, when Dad Lewis returns from hospital with terminal cancer. He has come home to die which he duly does at the end of the novel. That’s it. That’s the story and yet I don’t think I’ve read anything recently that kept me so avidly turning the pages. Alongside the very sad story of Dad’s decline there are sub-plots which are completely uplifting, for example Dad’s next door neighbour takes in Alice, her orphaned eight-year-old granddaughter, and the rather shell-shocked child gradually grows in confidence as she is befriended by a group of older women.Haruf’s characters are uncompromisingly true to life. These are the folk you might expect to meet in typical small town America – conventional and small-minded with a tough outlook born of poverty and grinding hard work. Even the central character, Dad Lewis, upright citizen though he may be, is not likeable. His uncompromising moral standards have caused him to sack an employee who stole money from him, leading ultimately to the man’s suicide and his wife and children facing a life of desperate poverty. He has also alienated his son because he cannot cope with the fact that his offspring is homosexual. And yet, in all Hanuf’s characters, there are such flashes of courage and compassion that you are left feeling optimistic rather than depressed by the state of mankind. Dad Lewis, in penance for his over-hasty judgement, financially supports his ex-employee’s wife and children for years. The same folk who turn their back on Reverend Lyle for preaching that the United States should “turn the other cheek” instead of going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, turn out en masse to hunt for a missing child. Hanuf makes you care about his characters, despite their flaws and I, for one, want to go back there to find out how life works out for Alice as she grows up and whether Lorraine does take over the hardware store.Haruf’s style of writing is deceptively simple; he uses no imagery and his characters’ conversation is plain and natural, the ordinariness emphasised by the lack of quotation marks. This simplicity of style serves to make even more memorable certain scenes, such as the women’s baptism-like skinny dipping in the cattle’s stock tank or the terrifying account of the minister’s son attempting to hang himself. These are dramatic scenes, loaded with symbolic significance but it is Hanuf’s accounts of very ordinary events that make his work so powerful. Reverend Lyle goes out wandering the town looking for what he calls “the precious ordinary” in the lives of the townspeople of Holt and, at the end of the novel, the reader is left with a sense of being given an exceptional gift in being allowed access to their unexceptional lives.

After reading the first two books in the Plainsong Trilogy, I was really looking forward to learning how the various characters fared into the future. How disappointed I was to realise that none of the characters in the first two books feature in the third book. There were a couple of indirect "mentions" of previous characters, but this book focussed on completely new characters, and in particular on the family and friends of Dad Lewis, who is in his last few weeks of life (no spoilers; this is evident from the outset). Knowing that Kent Haruf's other two books are also set in Holt, it is very unclear why Benediction is described as part of the Plainbsong trilogy. So, that is reason #1 that I was disappointed.Reason #2 for disappointment was the quite different writing style and structure. Plainsong (book #1) was broken into chapters, each headed with the name of which character the chapter was focussed on. Eventide (book #2) removed this structure, and moved back and forth more than book #1 between the present and the past. It was therefore a bit more difficult to follow than book #1, but not too difficult. Book #3 was even more unstructured. Each chapter started annoyingly by using pronouns (he/she), so that it was often not until the second paragraph - or even later - that I could figure out which character was being referred to. It also bounced back to the past much more frequently, and not always clearly. As stated above, it also was much more focussed on one group of people.Having said all of this, the book is still worth reading. It was very sad and poignant, especially the last 50 pages, as Dad Lewis slipped closer and closer to oblivion.

This is the third volume in the author’s Plainsong Trilogy (see my reviews of the first two volumes, Plainsong and Eventide). I have to warn readers of this review that the marketing of this book as part of the Plainsong Trilogy is misleading: although the cast in the first two volumes is not identical, the central character in each of these are the lovable old McPheron brothers, and I hoped that the surviving brother Raymond would still figure in this volume. But he had died some time ago and there are only a couple of oblique references to him (he is not even named) and to one other character in Eventide. What links the three novels is simply that the story is set in the little township of Holt in Colorado - but then that is also the setting of of Haruf’s next (and last, posthumously published) novels, Our Souls at Night (see my review), which is not part of the trilogy. So that was something of a disappointment.I found it a little disappointing in other ways as well: the story moves back and forward in time; he has added another mannerism to the absence of speech marks: most chapters begin with “he” or “she” and it takes a moment to find out to whom the pronoun refers.The central character in this volume is 77 year old “Dad” Lewis who, we are told right at the beginning, had cancer and would not have long to live. He is stoical about that, and the long scene at the end is very moving. He had been looked after by his wife Mary and his daughter Lorraine. Lorraine has had a tragedy, and her brother Frank had left the family some years ago and hasn’t been in touch with his parents since. It takes some time before we find out what the tragedy was and why Frank had run away.Several other neighbours in Holt visit “Dad” and do what they can to help: the new clergyman, the Rev. Lyle, who will upset his congregation and even his wife and son; Willa Johnson and her unhappy middle-aged daughter Alene; Berta May and her eight year-old grand-daughter Alice. Each have their own stories, some mundane, some sad (there is a lot of sadness in these lives), some dramatic; but I felt that the fact that they all visited “Dad” Lewis is not enough to give the novel unity, and some of the incidents in them are rather inconsequential. And as the story didn’t entirely grip me, the minute descriptions of every movement the characters make and of every street they drive or walk along, which had been a feature of the earlier books also, became a little irritating also. And I can’t think that its title is very appropriate.If this review seems rather negative, it is because I had expected this novel to be as good as its two predecessors. But the book is still eminently readable, and its characters will remain in my memory for a long time.

This is a novel where very little happens. There are no wars, no gunfights, no sex scenes, no murders or robberies or explosions, physical or emotional. But there is a quiet summer afternoon swimming in the water tower. There is the hesitant farewell visit by old employees of Dad's store. There are church services, temporarily lost children, disappointed faces. There are women and men, all equally well-drawn, all equally created with sensitivity, wisdom and humour. This is a novel of real lives truly lived in a fictional America which is more real in the consciousness of Americans than the one that really does exist. I think of Haruf's novels as portrayals of the tranquil majesty of regular lives. There is such truth in his voice, such beauty in his words that I find myself getting quite emotional just thinking about it.Benediction completes a trilogy which is, I believe, one of the great creations of contemporary American fiction. I don't think there's much more I can say about it than that.

I wanted to read this because it is the final part in the trilogy set in Holt, but it’s actually quite different in that it really does revolve much more around one character and the comings and goings as he faces his final months and family, friends and neighbours come to say goodbye. It’s beautifully written once again but somewhat of a disappointment for me because I had hoped to catch up with some well loved characters from previous books and they were absent. But I’m still glad I read it. Just not so much of a rave review this time.

This is an almost perfect finish to the trilogy (assuming that this is the final installment).'Almost' because, unlike the first two books which gave some continuity via the characters, this book has a completely new set. The other minus is that the atmosphere of the landscape (so central to the earlier books) is lacking; this is an almost entirely character-driven story.I still give this 5 stars because the characters are fantastic, the story wonderful and uplifting (without resorting to maudlin sentimentality or clichés), and the writing is the best of the three.If a book leaves me planning to re-read it again very soon (a rare thing), that is a good sign.