‘Benediction’

By Kent Haruf
Alfred A. Knoff, 2013.

The elegiac tone of Kent Haruf’s Benediction suggests that this novel might be his last, but his fans hope for future returns to Holt, Colorado, the fictional setting populated by characters who lead lives of quiet desperation but nonetheless make connections that allow them not only to endure but to find moments of peace.

When the test came back the nurse called them into the examination room and when the doctor entered the room he just looked at them and asked them to sit down. They could tell by the look on his face where matters stood.
Go on ahead, Dad Lewis said, say it.
I’m afraid I don’t have very good news for you, the doctor said.

And so begins Benediction. Many readers will find the final journey of Dad Lewis familiar, having accompanied others who have already completed theirs. And some of us of a certain age will feel the shadow of our own mortality.

But while the fate of Dad Lewis is foretold in the opening paragraphs of the book, the life that he has yet before him as he seeks reconciliation for his past is the stuff of living, not death. Haruf is never morbid nor is he maudlin. This is a plainsong, a single melodic line connecting lives of people who make their days on the plains, existences as common as homespun fabric, but sacred in the archetypal patterns that they trace.

In Benediction the final days of Dad Lewis are intersected by that of a clergyman (perhaps not coincidentally, Haruf’s father was a Methodist minister) who is losing his church, his family, and maybe his faith; a retired school teacher who may have lost her one chance for love and romance; a son who has lost his connection with his father; and a young girl who has lost her mother.

Although Dad Lewis’s end comes as no surprise to the reader, the story is compelling, the characters as engagingly and at times as poignantly true to life as the plains dialect they speak; the two clerks who have worked forever in Dad Lewis’s hardware store perspire uncomfortably at his wake wearing their best suits, the winter fabric inappropriate for the hot summer weather, and they are equally uneasy dealing with their grief.

Haruf’s best-selling novel Plainsong (1999) introduced readers to bachelor brothers who took a homeless pregnant teenage girl into their farm home. Eventide (2004) continued the brothers’ story as she goes off to college. And Benediction takes Dad Lewis on a short nostalgic drive through the country, passing the farm where the late bachelor brothers had once lived.

Benediction, written in a series of related vignettes, is an ideal summer read. And if this is your introduction to Haruf, you need not to be familiar with the two earlier novels to enjoy this one. But don’t be surprised if the story sends you back for more, including his first two books, The Tie That Binds (1984) and Where You Once Belonged (1990).

That was on a night in August. Dad Lewis died early that morning and the young girl Alice from next door got lost in the evening and then found her way home in the dark by the streetlights of town and so returned to the people who loved her.
And in the fall the days turned cold and the leaves dropped off the trees and in the winter the wind blew from the mountains and out on the high plans of Holt County there were overnight storms and three-day blizzards.

And so ends Benediction.