The Kindness of Strangers: The Fiction of Kent Haruf

JEFFREY FOLKS has taught in Europe, America, and Japan, most recently as Professor of Letters in the Graduate School of Doshisha University in Japan. He has published numerous books and articles on American literature including In a Time of Disorder: Form and Meaning in Southern Fiction from Poe to O’Connor (2003) and Damaged Lives: Southern and Caribbean Narrative from Faulkner to Naipaul. (2005).

In 1999, when Kent Haruf burst on the
scene, so to speak, with his bestselling
novel Plainsong, he was already fifty-six
years old. At this point, Haruf had been
writing fiction for well over thirty years
and had published two previous novels,
The Tie That Binds in 1984 and Where
You Once Belonged in 1990. Although his
early novels earned him a degree of critical
recognition, neither was a popular success.
Following graduation from Nebraska
Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writer’s
Workshop, where he earned an MFA, most
of Haruf ‘s life had been spent working in
agriculture, construction, and teaching.
Only after the popular success of Plainsong,
which was also filmed as a CBS television
movie, was Haruf able to devote himself
full time to writing.

It seems fitting that Haruf, the son of a
Methodist minister and one who has spent
most of his life on the Great Plains, should
achieve his first real success with a novel
entitled Plainsong. His writing is, after all,
both a “song” of the plains and a stylistic
approximation of “plainsong,” a variety of
monophonic Christian vocal music expressive
of the quiet devotion and devout faith
of the religious communities in which it is
practiced. Haruf ‘s writing is marked by an
attitude of stillness and reflection devoted
to the enduring relationship of human
beings to a particular place, a stable code
of ethics, and an unwavering faith in the
goodness of life. This faith in what T. S.
Eliot called the “permanent things” affords
solace and defense against the chaotic
force inherent in both nature and human
society—a force of disorder that within
our nation’s symbolism has always been
connected with the Western frontier. Even
today, the West, populated as one imagines
by a raggedy band of misfits, cultists, survivalists,
and hardened loners, remains the
locus of America’s outlaw mythology. Like
the “American nomads” of whom Richard
Grant writes in a book of the same name,
Haruf depicts Westerners who are engaged
in a “process of retreat and withdrawal,
from the damage within themselves and
human relationships in general.”¹ Unlike
Grant’s nomads, however, who include lost
conquistadors, mountain men, cowboys,
Indians, hoboes, and bullriders, among
others, and all of whom seem to prefer
their proud, uncompromising solitude to
the less-than-ideal accommodation of everyday
life, Haruf ‘s rebellious spirits find
themselves tamed, even amidst the physical
isolation of the great Western plains, by
the redemptive force of an enduring civilization.
Unlike the many desperado figures
in our popular culture (Clint Eastwood,
Waylon Jennings, Thelma and Louise, and
the rest), Haruf ‘s drifters and rebels crave
the protective shelter of those caring, generous
souls, themselves often reclusive by
nature, who discover their own redemption
in acts of charity. Thus, in Haruf ‘s fiction
the Western myth is humanized and
assuaged, and the simplistic image of the
outlaw hero prevalent in our popular culture
is displaced by a more realistic image
and underlying truth: that the goodness
of heartland America, and of America as a
whole, is grounded in traditional values and
virtues that foster acceptance rather than
isolation, serenity rather than violence, belief
rather than doubt. As Jonathan Miles
wrote (in an otherwise dismissive review),
Plainsong is “a life raft for people who felt
they were drowning in the sour froth of
pop cynicism.”²

The problem is, of course, that as a
civilization we have been drowning in a
sea of cynicism, and the consequences of
this sneering distrust become more apparent,
decade by decade. As Leszek Kolakowski
has suggested, there exists “a
close link between the dissolution of the
sacred” and certain “spiritual phenomena”
that contribute to the decline and perhaps
“suicide” of Western culture. According
to Kolakowski, these phenomena include
“the love of the amorphous, the desire for
homogeneity, the illusion that there are no
limits to the perfectibility of which human
society is capable, immanentist eschatologies,
and the instrumental attitude toward
life.”³ The damaging effects of these phenomena
manifest themselves throughout
our culture, from the extraordinarily high
divorce rates to the reduction of social
communities to a humorless, legalistic exercise
of correctness, to the cult-like appeal
of radical ideologies. At the core of
Kent Haruf ‘s artistic sensibility, there exists
just such an awareness of the waning
of belief in the sacred. Like Kolakowski,
Haruf records the dangerous appeal of the
amorphous: the urge to flee from the burdens
of responsibility, tradition, and constancy
in search of greater personal freedom
and choice. In novels that depict the
need for commitment, charity, and most
of all faith, Haruf points to the destructive
implications of a humanistic philosophy
that would elevate personal freedom
and pleasure above all other values. With
his profound reverence for life, Haruf opposes
those forces of contemporary culture,
from the deadening influence of state bureaucracies
to the dulling materialism and
standardization of consumer culture, that
undermine the value of human life and the
essential awareness of the sacred.

Given Haruf ‘s pervasive sense of cultural
damage, it is not surprising that his
thematic intentions focus on two central
matters: first, a compelling documentation
of the decline of the sacred and, second, a
register of the damage that this decline has
caused. In his understanding of the concept
of the sacred, however, Haruf is less interested
in the influence of sectarian religious
practices than he is in a deep-seated and
universal religious sensibility that underlies
the most important human affiliations,
among them the relationships of parents
and children, the response to nature, and
the ever-present awareness of human mortality.
Though much of contemporary behavior
seems to proceed from the cynical
assumption that existence is fundamentally
irremediable and anarchic, the centrality
of purposeful action grounded in religious
faith has always stood at the center of
Western identity. Within classical culture
focused on the vita activa, there resided an
unshakable confidence concerning the potentiality
for human action. It is this faith,
extending to a conviction regarding the
existence of an afterlife, which has been
generally dismissed with the rise of skepticism
in contemporary culture, within
which it is not action but various forms of
constriction and relinquishment that have
preoccupied philosophical speculation. In
the view of theorists from Nietzsche to
Heidegger and from Sartre to Foucault,
existence is best understood in terms of absence
and loss, and human action is more
apt to be viewed as purposeless and indifferent
than as good, and within the culture
of suspicion that has arisen in the wake of
this destructive theory, all assertions of
purposeful action are greeted with distrust.
Gradually, throughout the past century,
an “age of decline” in which Czeslaw
Milosz detects an ever greater materialism,
nihilism, and “collapse of values,”⁴ the
conception of human life as the vita activa
has largely disappeared among intellectuals,
and a culture of absence and opposition
has taken hold.

Kent Haruf ‘s novels constitute a sophisticated
response to this spreading tide of
defeatism. At the center of these fictional
works is a focus on the classical-Christian
faith in human existence as purposeful and
good, and at the heart of this mythos is a
recognition of the new beginning that enters
the world with the birth of every child.
A vivid example of this affirmation is the
meeting of the elderly McPheron brothers
and seventeen-year-old Victoria Roubideaux
in the novel Plainsong. Harold and
Raymond McPheron, lifelong bachelors
sunk in a stagnant round of farm chores
and a sterile, silent home life, appear to be
“doomed” by their loss of opportunity for
purposeful action. As Harold says, “Think
of us. Crotchety and ignorant. Lonesome.
Independent. Set in all our ways. How you
going to change now at this age of life?”⁵
Reduced to a fruitless and reclusive condition,
lacking beauty, joy, or the challenge
of the unfamiliar, they are simply living out
their lives and waiting for death. Yet Plainsong
and Eventide, Haruf ‘s two novels that
focus on the relationship of the McPheron
brothers and Victoria Roubideaux, depict
the transformation of isolated, unproductive
lives into a more hopeful condition of
mutual responsibility. Their meeting with
Victoria—indigent, bereft of emotional
support, and uncertain where to turn after
she becomes pregnant—rekindles hope
because it allows them the opportunity to
engage in purposeful activity. After their
meeting with Victoria, the McPherons are
spurred to decisive action. As Raymond
informs his brother of his decision to
shelter the young woman, he delivers the
news more as an ultimatum than a request,
“Now, are you going to go in on this thing
with me or not? Cause I’m going to do it
anyhow, whatever.” To which Harold replies,
“I will. I’ll agree. I shouldn’t, but I
will. I’ll make up my mind to it.”⁶

The spare, laconic expression of the
McPherons suggests their moral clarity
and their determination not merely to refl
ect but to act on behalf of their beliefs.
Unbeknownst to them, Victoria begins to
share in this ethical imperative after she
learns that she is pregnant. Following her
visit to the Holt County Clinic, she stands
in the street outside sensing that reality for
her has become “hard-edged, definite, as
if it were no longer merely a late fall afternoon
in the hour before dusk, but instead
as if it were the first moment of noon
in the exact meridian of summer.”⁷ Her
newfound sense of distinctness and lucid-
ity are the result of the revelation that she
is now almost solely responsible for the
future well-being of a particular human
being. As the McPherons realize, this responsibility
“ain’t going to be no goddamn
Sunday school picnic,”⁸ but for Victoria it
is in reality the great opportunity of her
life. It is most certainly the first time in
her unstable, loveless existence that she has
entered into a permanent and total attachment
to anyone or anything. As her pregnancy
proceeds, Victoria’s self-awareness
and her appreciation of everything outside
herself changes. Even the dry, wind-swept,
desolate landscape of Holt County seems
transformed.

In terms of this thematic emphasis, the
landscape of northeastern Colorado, in
fact, plays a significant role in Plainsong and
in all of Haruf ‘s novels. The fictional Holt
County, a mythic landscape that is at the
same time more desolate and more plenteous
of spirit and beauty than any actual
setting that one could find, is the stuff of
moral allegory. Although it may be based
on an actual locale, that of northeastern
Colorado, the region that Haruf depicts
is more akin to that of John Bunyan: it
is a desolate landscape with its own City
of Destruction, an imaginative locale in
which the consequences of moral choice
loom larger than any geographical feature.
From what Haruf tells us of its early history
in The Tie That Binds, Holt County is the
place where a version of natural selection
has taken place among settlers who have
had to wrest a meager living from the dry,
sandy soil, and those who have remained
possess special qualities of determination,
durability, and patience coupled with the
virtues of humility and kindness. They are
in this sense a “chosen people”—chosen
not only by God but by the stark, winnowing
effects of the American heartland.
An Old Testament sensibility attaches easily
to this culture and to Haruf ‘s rendering
of it, and especially pertinent is the Biblical
account of Exodus. The early settlers
on the Western frontier were leading their
families out of slavery in the East, the land
of Pharaohs in the guise of crippling taxes
and governmental tyranny to the homestead
lands west of the Mississippi. Like the
Promised Land beyond the River Jordan,
Western land held out the promise of freedom
and new life.

Accordingly, the landscape described in
Plainsong suggests an existence that is often
cruel and unforgiving but that demands
moral decisiveness and clarity. The night
in early March when Raymond sets out
for his ill-fated second “date” with Linda
May, Haruf captures a sense of the special
moral loveliness of the plains:

It was a Saturday night, the sky overhead
clear of any cloud, the stars as
clean and bright as if they were no
more distant than the next barbedwire
fence post standing up above
the narrow ditch running beside
the narrow blacktop highway, everything
all around him distinct
and unhidden. He loved how it all
looked, except that he would never
have said it in that way. He might
have said that this was just how it
was supposed to look, out on the
high plains at the end of winter, on a
clear fresh night.⁹

The moral idealism of heartland America
that Haruf invokes hearkens back to
faith in America as a second Eden—a
paradise not only because of its material
abundance but also because of its spiritual
richness. In this land settlers of modest
means, or of none at all, could seek a life
of dignity and purpose. In this noble endeavor,
they brought with them the transforming
knowledge of an inherited faith
and ethical culture, and this inheritance
would at least afford solace and hope, if
not always success. In the West these settlers
preserved and renewed the civilization
that they brought with them from the
East. From this perspective, America’s role
in world history was understood to be that
of conservator of the ancient traditions of
reverence for life that her earliest European
settlers had brought with them. The
sheer scale and rough splendor of the West
were, after all, intricately connected with
a national mythos of providential history
that Russell Martin terms “spatial hope.”¹⁰
Even as life in the eastern cities seemed to
close in upon one, even as the nation as a
whole seemed at times to have lost its way,
one could look to the West as a mythic setting
of national virtue and strength. This
potent myth remains a significant factor in
our nation’s conception of its identity and
of its relationship to the rest of the world.

Equally a part of this myth is the recognition
of the paradox that the attractiveness
of the frontier West as a last bastion of hope
has necessarily contributed to that region’s
diminishment as those who flee the East
in search of opportunity bring with them
civilization’s ills. Inevitably, hope must be
qualified by evidence of the inherent corruption
of human nature, an unregenerate
feature of existence that trumps even frontier
optimism. It was this same evidence of
corruption in the Old World that impelled
the Founders to establish an intricate system
of checks and balances, a governmental
system grounded on hope but also on
the recognition of the inherent fallibility
of human nature. Hannah Arendt credited
the wisdom of American democracy
when she noted that, following the gradual
loss of conviction in religion and tradition
throughout the post-medieval period, “the
revolutions of the modern age appear like
gigantic attempts to repair these foundations.”
¹¹ In Arendt’s view, only the American
Revolution was successful in attending
to the lapse of political order and reinstating
a system that was both stable and compelling
of belief. While Arendt outlined
many challenges to the survival of American
civilization, she never lost faith in the
value of the Founders’ vision of a liberal democracy
governed within a constitutional
framework of law. It is not Haruf ‘s intention,
of course, to engage in a discussion of
political theory within the context of his
fiction, but, based on the manner in which
he addresses similar concerns, it is clear
that he shares Arendt’s faith. One of the
qualities that the McPheron brothers share
with Tom Guthrie is an adamant refusal
to surrender their rights as free citizens. In
their refusal to do so—as when Tom stands
up to the attempts of Russell Beckman and
his family to usurp his proper authority as a
teacher—Haruf ‘s protagonists defend their
rights within a democracy to move about
and to congregate freely, to be recognized
as equals under the law, and to “speak their
piece.” Clearly, however, Haruf fears that
these rights are at risk within a society in
which, as Kolakowski noted, the claims of
homogeneity and the radical demands of
free will appear to override traditional restraints
of custom and belief.

As a result of the determination of at
least some of its citizens to preserve their
freedoms, Holt County might well be
seen as a promised land of the sort upon
which the Founders premised their efforts.
In contrast with the pointless frenzy of
postmodernist culture, Haruf ‘s fictionalized
world is a place of coherence and purposefulness,
a place where roads are platted
on a grid running straight north-south or
east-west, and a place where an innate respect
for order still resides in the human
heart. The fictionalized Holt County possesses
a deep simplicity—a quality that, as
Mark McCloskey points out, “is equated
with virtue”¹² in the novel—that acts as a
counterbalance to the dominant culture
of alienation embodied in the closest large
city, Denver. This urban enchantress is
the place to which many of the younger
residents of Holt County flee from the
seeming boredom of life on the plains and
where they seek pleasure in activities that,
like the coarse party to which Dwayne
takes Victoria during her pregnancy, tend
toward the destruction of new life. In doing
so, they are deserting a better place of
clear values and active goodness for a dark
underworld of moral confusion and selfcontempt.
In Haruf ‘s imaginative world,
those who flee from rural America to the
city soon find themselves in dreary, isolating
circumstances, surviving in characterless
apartment buildings in which human
beings are severed from nature and walled
off from each other.

The contrast with life on the McPheron
ranch could not be any greater. Here the
brothers are immersed in the rich life of
nature; here the weather plays a critical
role in their efforts; and here birth and the
nurturing of new life are the central activities.
In his intricate descriptions of the
McPheron cattle operation, Haruf details
the processes of birthing, weaning, milking,
and separating out cattle for slaughter,
a labor that is bounded by the elemental
forces of nature. There is, for example, the
powerful but disturbing scene in which
Haruf recounts the autopsy of a beloved
horse, Elko, as witnessed by her owners,
two young boys. Yet in the way that Haruf
describes the cattle and farming operations,
there is the inescapable implication that
the same order of necessity enfolds human
affairs, and it is largely in these terms that
the McPherons initially interpret Victoria’s
pregnancy. Though she is not a cow giving
birth to a calf, Harold at first finds it diffi
cult to separate her condition from that of
the larger order of nature within which he
as a rancher has been immersed for seventy
years. Clearly, he and Raymond do come
to distinguish her condition from that of
the farm animals with which they are more
familiar, yet on the elemental level, at least,
the pattern of human life, with the cycle of
birth, growth, maturity, and death, is no
different from what the brothers observe
in their ranching operation, and it is this
fact that human existence is bounded by
necessity that gives rise to their discovery
of life’s precious opportunities for charity.
Just as the brothers sometimes have to step
in to assist in the birth of calves, they willingly
assist Victoria in the months before
and after the birth of her daughter. From
their perspective, it is assumed that they
will volunteer this assistance as a matter of
course.

Out of this elemental condition emerges
a culture of humanity and compassion,
yet even as Haruf ‘s novels depict acts of
decency and kindness on the part of the
McPherons and others, they suggest a paradoxical
truth that the heartland’s harsh
and unforgiving environment should foster
such nobility while the less demanding
urban milieu represented by Denver seems
a place of exploitation and degradation.
Like William Blake in this respect, Haruf
finds the urban scene filled with “marks of
weakness, marks of woe.” Those who have
known grief, ranchers like the McPherons
who have themselves struggled and have
witnessed the efforts and often the failures
of others, have learned hard lessons of concern
and self-restraint, while others like
Vicky’s boyfriend, Dwayne, fail to register
the suffering of others, perhaps because
they have never had to suffer themselves.
The reality of suffering and the need
for responsible behavior are made apparent
throughout Haruf ‘s writing. In his first
novel, The Tie That Binds, we are introduced
to Edith Goodnough, a woman who
practices self-denial and service to others
every day of her life. Growing up in a
hard-pressed agricultural economy before
the Second World War, Edith finds that she
must give up the great love of her life, John
Roscoe, in order to care for her widowed
father after he loses all but one of his fingers
in a reaping machine accident. Unlike
her younger brother, Lyman, who as his
name suggests is essentially disingenuous
and irresponsible, Edith is conscientious,
perhaps to a fault. While Lyman spends the
first two decades of his adulthood traveling
aimlessly around the country, sending
Edith a packet of $20 bills every Christmas
along with only a tersely worded postcard
identifying the city in which he is living,
Edith forgoes love and the chance for independence
in order to devote herself to
the care of a disabled parent. When Lyman
finally returns to Holt County, he and
Edith live together for six “good years,”
“almost as if they were honeymooners.”¹³
For Edith, however, the good years end all
too soon, as Lyman drifts into senility.

Edith Goodnough is not the only character
in The Tie That Binds who experiences
tragedy. Sanders Roscoe, the novel’s
first-person narrator, is a young man who
must learn the hard lesson that life is ennobled
only by facing up to the circumstances
that one finds oneself in. In Sandy’s
case, this involves facing the consequences
of his own indecisiveness toward the role
of fatherhood. After he marries Mavis
Pickett in 1963, he and Mavis lose their
first baby in a car accident in which Lyman
Goodnough is the driver. In 1969 Sandy
and Mavis have another child, a daughter
named Rena Pickett, who then becomes a
frequent visitor at the Goodnough farm.
There, in a moment of anger and confusion,
the crazed Lyman attacks Rena and
Edith after beating the family dog, Nancy.
In the end Edith is unable to care for her
increasingly dependent brother, and she
decides to end Lyman’s and her own life
by setting fire to the farmhouse, a solution
that is only forestalled when Mavis and
Sandy hear Nancy barking where Edith
has tied her up outside. Having rushed
to the burning farmhouse, Sandy realizes
that Edith wishes to die, and he attempts
to prevent the fire crew from entering the
house. The crew is able to restrain him and
remove Edith and Lyman, but Lyman dies
in the hospital that night. Then, at the age
of eighty, Edith is charged with murder.
At the end of the novel, it is the beauty
of Edith’s character that impresses Sandy,
even as she faces prosecution for her brother’s
murder. As he says, she has spent her
entire life “without her ever understanding
how to say anything like a continuous
yes to herself.” She is “still in the ways that
matter, just as fine and beautiful as she must
have been in 1922” when she was dating
John Roscoe.¹⁴ Haruf ‘s handling of syntax
in these and other passages seems a perfect
reflection of both the narrator’s countrifi
ed manner and, more to the point, the
countryman’s stubborn resistance to the
easy cliché and thoughtless turn of phrase
of his urban counterpart. The speaker’s
voice, like his nickname “Sandy,” conveys
a gritty resistance to the self-serving correctness
of liberal culture, in lieu of which
he speaks only heartfelt if sometimes awkward
truths.

It is hardly coincidental that the prosecutor’s
decision to bring charges against
Edith is prompted by the unwelcome prying
of a smug young investigative reporter
from one of the Denver papers. The media
of our time, after all, trade in a commerce
of glib lies and half-truths, peddled in the
rapid-fire flux of distorted and contextless
words and images. As James Bowman
writes in Honor: A History, “news and entertainment
have grown ever more indistinguishable
in the last decade,” a fact
that Bowman sees as one consequence of
the rise of “celebrity culture” in place of
the old honor culture.¹⁵ As Bowman sees
it, the rise of investigative journalism is a
manifestation of contemporary culture’s
willingness to subject the private and in
some cases trivial details of honorable public
lives to a corrosive cynicism while, at
the same time, excusing all manner of indiscretion
and even criminal behavior on
the part of celebrity entertainers. The public
demands continual entertainment from
its clownish celebrities, but it also delights
in seeing serious and decent individuals
brought down. The spectacle of an eightyyear-
old matron on trial for murder is just
the sort of story that melds news and entertainment.
In contrast to this inane and
meretricious entertainment, Haruf ‘s fiction
labors through a narration that depicts
generations of sacrifice and real consequence
to construct an architecture of tales
which function as moral fable, patiently
placing present-day events in the coherent
context of family and fixed inhabitation.
The austere, inhospitable environment of
the fictionalized Holt County represents a
useful corrective to the current appetite for
glib journalistic editorializing with its suggestion
that, given the material abundance
of American life, all things come easily as a
matter of entitlement, and no fault attaches
to any behavior, however mistaken. By
contrast, Haruf ‘s vision is more weighty
and consequential. As is reflected in the
slow, resolute quality of his narration,
every action must be weighed with care
because all actions possess consequences
beyond our knowing. Recognizing the
consequential nature of our actions, however,
is the first step toward salvaging our
imperfect lives.

In this respect, Haruf ‘s fiction proceeds
from a profound idealism since it implies
the possibility of improving the world
through the actions of those who take
their responsibilities and limitations seriously.
The kindness of strangers that so
often intercedes to arrest the ugly normality
of abuse or indifference proceeds from
the recognition that suffering and impairment
are real and that human resources
are constrained. The abandonment of a
teenaged girl by her boyfriend after she
becomes pregnant is, after all, what many
have come to accept as the norm in contemporary
society, yet in Plainsong Victoria
Roubideaux is befriended, first by her high
school teacher, Maggie Jones, and then by
the McPheron brothers. It is a small miracle
that such unlikely saviors would step
in to aid the girl, although at the same
time such saving is also a confirmation of
life’s absence: the fact that such unlikely
miracles have to be deployed attests to the
prevailing callousness of modern society,
which is thus redoubled in Haruf ‘s telling.
Our condition of loss is made to seem all
the more inescapable by Haruf ‘s reliance
on quirky acts of charity in which a few
noble strangers—several of them elderly
persons who do not survive the stories they
inhabit—step in to take the place of family
structures that are found to be wanting.
Within these relationships (for example,
the relationship of the dying Ida Stearns to
the two Guthrie boys—providing loving
attention in the absence of a mother who
has deserted them to live with her sister in
Denver), such a large reliance on private
acts of charity testifies to the collapse of
the structures of order and belief that Arendt
referred to as the “private realm.”

For eons the private realm was ruled
by the authority of the pater familias, a figure
that decades of post–Father Knows Best
ridicule has rendered laughable but that
for millennia afforded private life a clear
sense of boundaries and purpose equivalent
in its way to the authority of tradition
and religion within the public realm. From
the perspective of contemporary culture,
with its demands of maximum personal
freedom and its arrogant rejection of all
restraints on free will, paternal authority
seems an unwelcome holdover from
the past, yet, as Tennessee Williams understood,
those who are dependent on the
kindness of strangers rarely end well, and
their dependence is a gauge of the collapse
of normal institutions and authorities. The
category of “normality,” in any case, has
long ceased to exist outside the American
heartland, and even here it seems much at
risk. Haruf ‘s disturbing accounts reveal a
society in which the mutual care of husbands
and wives, children and siblings, and
teachers and pupils has been supplanted by
the assumption that essential human needs
can be serviced at will by any person or
agency. From this abstract and bureaucratic
perspective, all human affiliations
are capable of easy replication and substitution,
and human expectations, like the
serviceable pies that the Holt café dishes
up in predictable varieties of apple, cherry,
and coconut cream, are reduced to the
level of function and routine. But in Haruf
‘s fiction, in response to an increasingly
nihilistic and disaffected national culture,
these old-fashioned virtues continue to be
asserted.

A crucial element in this faith is the
presence of caritas, an action of charity
that Diana Postlethwaite mistakenly interprets
as “fundamentally humanistic,
this-worldly.”¹⁶ In fact, Haruf ‘s novels are
replete with miracles, redemptive acts that
imply more than the kindness of strangers
based on humanistic assumptions, for what
is involved therein is an underlying faith in
the sacredness of life. Among these saving
relationships is that of D. J. Kephart, a forlorn,
impoverished waif who lives with his
grandfather, and Dena Wells, the daughter
of a depressed, alcoholic woman separated
from her husband. Their condition makes
D. J. and Dena representative figures of
contemporary American children. It is a
fact, after all, that today three quarters of
American children live in households of
transient, unwed, separated, or divorced
parents who are often unable or unwilling
to care for their children. Yet, from their
distressing condition of insecurity and neglect,
D. J. and Dena flee to an abandoned
neighborhood shed which they begin to
furnish with discarded furniture, rugs, and
other domestic objects of the sort that embody
a sense of normality. The shed provides
a refuge for them in the context of a
harsh, brutal world, but by its very existence,
it also serves as evidence of just how
disturbed the social realm has become. In
the section where Haruf describes the week
of Christmas vacation during which D. J.
and Dena huddle together under a thick
blanket reading library books and drinking
from the thermos of coffee that D. J.
brings, the sense of the shed as a refuge is
made explicit. Here is an oasis of happiness
and security, as suggested by Haruf ‘s
comment that “what was happening in the
houses they’d come from seemed, for that
short time, of little importance.”¹⁷

The relationship of D. J. and Dena raises
several important questions related to the
problematic nature of purposeful action
within a society that has largely dismissed
the claims of authority and tradition. Why
should Dena feel such need to preserve a
stable family? Why, in the face of all that
their culture shows them about the “normality”
of dysfunction, should D. J. take
responsibility for Dena, just as he does for
his ailing grandfather? Even as their culture
provides a safety net of welfare checks
and “services,” D. J. and Dena sense that
it seems incapable of addressing the real
source of damage. The neglect and abuse
that they suffer is, more than anything, the
product of a permissive, no-fault culture in
which selfish indifference is excused rather
than challenged.

Despite the cases of moral indifference
that Haruf narrates, there remains a ray of
sunshine in his world, although this ray
of hope derives largely from the personal
engagement of a small remnant who stand
outside the mainstream of contemporary
liberal culture. As the general society grows
more and more disaffected, convinced of
the futility of any action, it is only the resolve
of a few individuals that holds things
together. From their remote farm seventeen
miles south of the small town of Holt,
Colorado, the McPherons are engaged in
an effort to preserve a heritage of traditional
values: those bedrock values of honesty,
loyalty, humility, and hard work that
are central to Haruf ‘s writing. This vision
relies on the belief that America is indeed
the last best hope of the world—”a shining
city on a hill,” to cite Ronald Reagan’s
improvement on John Winthrop’s phrase
in A Model of Christian Charity. In this vision
of our civilization, America is a land
in which there still exists the possibility of
independence and liberty for all; it is a land
in which the innate goodness of mankind
has not been corrupted by the necessity of
subservience and mendacity imposed by
a caste system or by ideological tyranny;
above all, it is a land in which an ideal of
productive action still governs the lives
of at least a saving remnant. Yet the miraculous
opportunities that Winthrop and
Reagan cited have always been shadowed
by an immense burden: in the words of
Governor Winthrop, that of remaining
steadfast in “this work that we have undertaken”
so that God does not “withdraw
His present help from us” and we shall not
“be made a story and a byword through
the world.” To a large extent, whether we
succeed or fail in this labor depends on our
faith in the possibility of purposeful action,
whether of an entrepreneurial or political
or philanthropic sort. The lesson of virtue
that Haruf ‘s fiction teaches involves a
restoration of faith in ourselves and in our
ability to shoulder our responsibilities. Ultimately,
Haruf is simply asking whether
we, as a society, care enough to nurture
new life, and whether we care enough to
continue living ourselves.

NOTES

1. Richard Grant, American Nomads: Travels with Lost
   Conquistadors, Mountain Men, Cowboys, Indians, Hoboes,
   and Bullriders (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 62.

2. Jonathan Miles, “Eventide: Where the Dust Motes
   Glow,” New York Times Book Section (May 23, 2004),
   E2.

3. Leszek Kolakowski, “The Revenge of the Sacred
   in Secular Culture,” in Modernity on Endless Trial
   (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 69.

4. Czeslaw Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne
   (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1981), 227–8.

5. Kent Haruf, Plainsong (New York: Vintage, 2000),
   112.

6. Ibid., 113.
7. Ibid., 78.
8. Ibid., 113.
9. Kent Haruf,
   Eventide (New York: Knopf, 2004), 206.

10. Russell
    Martin, “Introduction,” in New Writers of the Purple
    Sage: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Writing
    (New York: Penguin, 1992), xviii.

11. Hannah Arendt,
    “What Is Authority?” in The Portable Hannah Arendt,
    ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin, 2003), 501.

12. Mark McCloskey, “Plainsong,” in Magill’s Literary Annual
    2000 (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2000), 617.

13. Kent Haruf, The Tie That Binds (New York: Vintage,
    2000), 166.

14. Ibid., 245–6.
15. James Bowman, Honor:
    A History (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), 317.

16. Diana Postlethwaite, “A Healing Melody: Kent
    Haruf ‘s Unadorned yet Elegant Novel Makes Extraordinary
    Music Out of the Ordinary Rhythms of Daily
    Life in a Small Colorado Town,” The World and I 15.2
    (Feb. 2000), 258.
17. 17 Kent Haruf, Eventide, 180.