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BY KENT HARUF
ALFRED A. KNOPF
FICTION
301 PAGES
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Oct. 18, 1999 |
Tom Guthrie, the history teacher, is caring for his 9- and 10- He stood over the table watching them eat. I have to go to school early this morning, he said. I'll be leaving in a minute.
As Guthrie's sons, Ike and Bobby, bike through town on their paper routes or spy on teenagers at an abandoned house, we get a boys'-eye view of Holt that reminds us how much children witness when they're out of eyeshot: sex and violence and even death. Haruf is equally perceptive when he turns his attention to Victoria Roubideaux, whose unexpected pregnancy shows her how alone she is. He never asks us to pity her, and we come to admire the graceful doggedness she brings to a seemingly impossible situation. She's got enough sense to ask for help from the right people. For Maggie Jones, one of her teachers, to hook her up with the McPheron brothers, two lonely, bighearted old-timers short on social skills, is a potentially corny "solution," but Haruf makes it work by showing us the uncomfortableness of the arrangement and letting it play itself out slowly. You could quibble with the quiet, almost ingenuous triumphalism that pokes through the novel. Troublesome figures, such as Guthrie's wife or the abusive father of Victoria's baby, simply go away. In real life, the people you don’t want to deal with hardly ever disappear; they hardly ever willingly forfeit their stake in the things you care about. The trick is figuring out how to share the earth with them. The novel's brief, celebratory conclusion might have been even more effective if it had included one or two disagreeable people. But Haruf is not naive about human nature; he doesn't look away from violence, and he has a keen eye for the devastatingly casual acts of cruelty that punctuate daily life. He's simply convinced that decency is ultimately its own reward, and it's this optimism, along with the quiet sophistication of his technique, that allows him to look into the hearts of his characters while still respecting their privacy.
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