A touching work, as honest and precise as the McPheron brothers themselves.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Everyone is struggling here, and it’s their decency, and their determination to care for one another, Haruf suggests, that gets them through. Haruf is equally good at catching the ways in which Tom and his sons must quietly struggle to deal with their differing feelings of loss, guilt, and abandonment. Harold and Raymond’s growing affection for Victoria gives her a sense of self-worth, which proves crucial when her vanished (and abusive) boyfriend, comes briefly back into her life. Some of Haruf’s best passages trace with precision and delicacy the ways in which, gradually, the gentle, the lonely brothers and Victoria begin to adapt to each other and then, over the course of Victoria’s pregnancy, to form a resilient family unit. Maggie places Victoria with the McPheron brothers, an arrangement that Guthrie, a friend of both Maggie and the McPherons, supports.

When her bitter mother locks her out, she turns to Maggie Jones, a compassionate teacher and a neighbor, for help. Victoria, pretty, insecure, uncertain of her own worth, has allowed herself to be seduced by a weak, spoiled lout who quickly disappears. Haruf (Where You Once Belonged, 1989, etc.) believably draws these various incomplete or troubled figures together.

Harold and Raymond McPheron, two aging but self-reliant cattle ranchers, are haunted by their imaginings of what they may have missed in life by electing never to get married, never to strike out on their own. Victoria Roubideaux, a high-school senior, is thrown out of her house when her mother discovers she’s pregnant. Among the several damaged families in this beautifully cadenced and understated tale is that of Tom Guthrie, a high-school history teacher in small Holt, Colorado, who’s left to raise his two young sons, Ike and Bobby, alone when his troubled wife first withdraws from them and then, without explanation, abandons them altogether.

it has the power to exalt the reader.” A stirring meditation on the true nature and necessity of family by bestselling author Kent Haruf.A stirring meditation on the true nature and necessity of the family. Lyrical and beautifully crafted, The New York Times Book Review calls Plainsong “a novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely. Set in the plains of rural Colorado, this award-winning novel weaves the stories of two bachelor farmers, a pregnant high school senior, a pair of motherless boys and a duo of devoted teachers into a lovely tale of community, wisdom and grace. Adapted by Kevin McKeon | Directed by Myra Platt

Plain song novel