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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
December 9, 1999
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1999 Plains Folk
This new book by Kent Haruf, "Plainsong" (published by Knopf)--at first I didn't like it at all. To begin with, there are at least two previous novels with the same title, the first a darn good one by Wright Morris, and an author ought to know such things.
Beyond that, I wasn't comfortable with the sense of place in the book. The work is set in a town called Holt, in eastern Colorado. The author is from Illinois, but judging by his descriptions, knows his way around the part of the plains he is writing about. What the author lacks, I kept thinking, is the ear for regional life. When Larry McMurtry recounts a conversation in a Texas Dairy Queen or W.O. Mitchell relates one from a Saskatchewan pool hall, you know these guys listen for expression and cadence. Haruf can't do what they do.
So I was halfway into the book before I realized what it was about. It's about families--how they fall apart, how they reform, how some people are better at making families than others, and how they happen one way or another.
Two families are breaking up as the book begins. Tom Guthrie and the two boys, Bobby and Ike, are left to rustle for themselves when their mother rouses from depression long enough to light out for Denver. Meanwhile, Victoria Roubideaux is thrown out of the house by her mother because Victoria has, as the phrase goes, "gotten into trouble."
The only traditional family unit in the book is the Beckman household, a family that really sticks together admirably. Father, mother and son all get together to beat up the son's history teacher, Guthrie.
Into the breach steps Maggie Jones, an earth-mother figure with a lot of dangling silver jewelry. She first takes in Victoria, then places her in an unlikely household--the farm home of bachelor farmers Raymond and Harold McPherson. These guys are the most credible characters in the book. Unable to break the conversational ice with their new ward, they finally resort to explaining the live cattle market to her. Perplexed by the progress of her pregnancy, they draw on their experience with heifers. When they confront Victoria's doctor and then take her to the department store to buy a crib, you know that sometimes the wrong people have kids and the right ones don't.
The Guthrie boys look around for a mother and find one in the person of an old woman on their paper route, who dies, leaving them to saddle up and ride to the McPherson farm. Somehow orphans are drawn there. Their father, the biggest orphan of all, eventually finds his way to Maggie's arms. The novel closes on an odd and homely tableau with the broken families all gathered at the farm, Victoria's new baby being rocked by the two Guthrie boys in the front porch swing. This book was going somewhere after all.
People on the plains like to think they are the last people in the country who still hold rock-ribbed family values. It's interesting, then, to consider some statistical research done by a history professor, Larry Peterson (and recently published in the journal Great Plains Research). He finds that in the plains states, most indicators of the relaxation of family values--divorce, children not living with both parents and so on--parallel those of the nation, just lagging behind a few years. Remarkably, he finds that on the plains substantially more married women--including women with young children--work outside the home than do women across the country. The plains, in other words, appear to have fewer traditional-family households than the country at large!
How many plains communities have a Maggie Jones to put things back together again? A lot of them, I hope. Maybe "Plainsong" will help awaken such possibilities.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable
for printing.
(isern.tif - 512KB b&w photo)
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable for printing.
(isern-h.tif - 426KB b&w photo)