Benediction
Kent Haruf, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307959881
Summary
From the beloved and best-selling author of Plainsong and Eventide comes a story of life and death, and the ties that bind, once again set out on the High Plains in Holt, Colorado.
When Dad Lewis is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he and his wife, Mary, must work together to make his final days as comfortable as possible. Their daughter, Lorraine, hastens back from Denver to help look after him; her devotion softens the bitter absence of their estranged son, Frank, but this cannot be willed away and remains a palpable presence for all three of them.
Next door, a young girl named Alice moves in with her grandmother and contends with the painful memories that Dad's condition stirs up of her own mother's death. Meanwhile, the town’s newly arrived preacher attempts to mend his strained relationships with his wife and teenaged son, a task that proves all the more challenging when he faces the disdain of his congregation after offering more than they are accustomed to getting on a Sunday morning. And throughout, an elderly widow and her middle-aged daughter do everything they can to ease the pain of their friends and neighbors.
Despite the travails that each of these families faces, together they form bonds strong enough to carry them through the most difficult of times. Bracing, sad and deeply illuminating, Benediction captures the fullness of life by representing every stage of it, including its extinction, as well as the hopes and dreams that sustain us along the way. Here Kent Haruf gives us his most indelible portrait yet of this small town and reveals, with grace and insight, the compassion, the suffering and, above all, the humanity of its inhabitants. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 24, 1943
• Where—Pueblo, Colorado, USA
• Died—November 30, 2014
• Where—Salida, Colorado
• Education—B.A., Nebraska Wesleyan University; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—(see below)
Alan Kent Haruf was an American novelist and author of six novels, all set in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado.
Life
Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, the son of a Methodist minister. He graduated with a BA from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965, where he would later teach, and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.
Before becoming a writer, Haruf worked in a variety of places, including a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Denver, a hospital in Phoenix, a presidential library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin, as an English teacher with the Peace Corps in Turkey, and colleges in Nebraska and Illinois.
He lived with his wife, Cathy, in Salida, Colorado until his death in 2014. He had three daughters from his first marriage.
Works
All of Haruf's novels take place in the fictional town of Holt, in eastern Colorado, a town based on Yuma, Colorado, one of Haruf's residences in the early 1980s. His first novel, The Tie That Binds (1984), received a Whiting Award and a special Hemingway Foundation/PEN citation. Where You Once Belonged followed in 1990. A number of his short stories have appeared in literary magazines.
Plainsong was published in 1999 and became a U.S. bestseller. The New York Times' Verlyn Klinkenborg called it "a novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader." Plainsong won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award and the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
Eventide, a sequel to Plainsong, was published in 2004. Library Journal described the writing as "honest storytelling that is compelling and rings true." Jonathan Miles saw it as a "repeat performance" and "too goodhearted."
On November 30, 2014, at the age of 71, Kent Haruf died at his home in Salida, Colorado, of interstitial lung disease.
Our Souls at Night, his final work, was published posthumously in 2015 and received wide praise. Ron Charles of the Washington Post called it "a tender, carefully polished work that it seems like a blessing we had no right to expect."
Recognition
1986 - Whiting Award for fiction
1999 - Finalist for the 1999 National Book Award for Plainsong
2005 - Colorado Book Award for Eventide
2005 - Finalist for the Book Sense Award for Eventide
2009 - Dos Passos Prize for Literature
2012 - Wallace Stegner Award
2014 - Folio Prize shortlist for Benediction
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/26/2015.)
Book Reviews
Kent Haruf’s novels...defy our expectation that literature rooted in a particular place should show how the place is changing. [Holt's] artfully stylized...stories [are about ]dramatic changes in the lives of the people of Holt.... [A] benediction (an epigraph informs us) is “the utterance of a blessing, an invocation of blessedness.” It’s a lovely effect, but here it calls attention to how little we come to know about Reverend Lyle: what led him to speak up for gay people back in Denver and against war here in Holt, what led him to quit the ministry so abruptly.... Haruf hints at Reverend Lyle’s motives but leaves things there, as if withholding the full story for some later installment.
Paul Elie - New York Times Book Review
We’ve waited a long time for an invitation back to Holt, home to Kent Haruf’s novels.... He may be the most muted master in American fiction: our anti-Franzen. Haruf's...novels are as plain and fortifying as steel-cut oatmeal: certified 100-percent irony-free, guaranteed to wither magic realism, stylistic flourishes and postmodern gimmicks.... At its best, Benediction offers deceptively simple "little dramas, the routine moments" of small-town life, stripped to their elemental details. Haruf's minimalism achieves more emotional impact than seems possible with such distilled material and so few words…He produces the kind of scenes that Hemingway might have written had he survived the ravages of depression.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
His finest-tuned tale yet.... There is a deep, satisfying music to this book, as Haruf weaves between such a large cast of characters in so small a space.... Strangely, wonderfully, the moment of a man's passing can be a blessing in the way it brings people together. Benediction recreates this powerful moment so gracefully it is easy to forget that, like [the town of] Holt, it is a world created by one man.
John Freeman - Boston Globe
Grace and restraint are abiding virtues in Haruf's fiction, and they resume their place of privilege in his new work.... For readers looking for the rewards of an intimate, meditative story, it is indeed a blessing.
Karen R. Long - Cleveland Plain Dealer
Haruf is maguslike in his gifts...to illuminate the inevitable ways in which tributary lives meander toward confluence.... Perhaps not since Hemingway has an American author triggered such reader empathy with so little reliance on the subjectivity of his characters.... [This] is a modestly wrought wonder from one of our finest living writers.
Bruce Machart - Houston Chronicle
As Haruf's precise details accrue, a reader gains perspective: This is the story of a man's life, and the town where he spent it, and the people who try to ease its end.... His sentences have the elegance of Hemingway's early work [and his] determined realism, which admits that not all of our past actions or the reasons behind them are knowable, even to ourselves, is one of the book's satisfactions.
John Reimringer - Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Haruf is the master of what one of his characters calls "the precious ordinary."... With understated language and startling emotional insight, he makes you feel awe at even the most basic of human gestures.
Ben Goldstein - Esquire
In Holt, the fictional Colorado town where all of Haruf’s novels are set, longtime resident Dad Lewis is dying of cancer. Happily married (he calls his wife “his luck”), Dad spends his last weeks thinking over his life, particularly an incident that ended badly with a clerk in his store, and his relationship with his estranged son. As his wife and daughter care for him, life goes on: one of the Lewises’ neighbors takes in her young granddaughter; an elderly woman and her middle-aged daughter visit with the Lewises, with each other, and with the new minister, whose wife and son are unhappy about his transfer to Holt from Denver. Haruf isn’t interested in the trendy or urban; as he once said, he writes about “regular, ordinary, sort of elemental” characters, who speak simply and often don’t speak much at all. “Regular and ordinary” can equate with dull. However, though this is a quiet book, it’s not a boring one. Dad and his family and neighbors try, in small, believable ways, to make peace with those they live among, to understand a world that isn’t the one in which they came of age. Separately and together, all the characters are trying to live—and in Dad’s case, to die—with dignity, a struggle Haruf (Eventide) renders with delicacy and skill.
Publishers Weekly
Haruf made his name with the heartfelt Plainsong, a best seller and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The subsequent Eventide, also a best seller, revisited Plainsong's setting, high-plains Holt, CO. Haruf again returns to Holt but with a new cast, among them Dad Lewis, dying of cancer and comforted by his wife and daughter though still estranged from his son. Then there's the little girl mourning her mother and a new preacher struggling with both his family and his congregation. Bittersweet charm.
Library Journal
Reverberant… From the terroir and populace of his native American West, the author of Plainsong and Eventide again draws a story elegant in its simple telling and remarkable in its authentic capture of universal human emotions. —Brad Hooper
Booklist
A meditation on morality returns the author to the High Plains of Colorado, with diminishing returns for the reader.... With his third novel with a one-word title set in Holt, the narrative succumbs to melodrama and folksy wisdom as it details the death of the owner of the local hardware store, a crusty feller who has seen his own moral rigidity soften over the years, though not enough to accomplish a reconciliation with his estranged son.... The death of Dad has dignity and gravitas, but too much leading up to it seems like contrived plotline filler. Between one character's insistence that "[e]verything gets better" and another's belief that "[a]ll life is moving through some kind of unhappiness," the novel runs the gamut of homespun philosophizing. Even the epiphanies seem like reheated leftovers.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Two of Haruf’s previous novels set in Holt, Plainsong and Eventide, followed the same groups of characters, but Benediction mentions them only in passing. Have you read those two novels? Do you think reading them would increase your enjoyment of Benediction?
2. The book’s epigraph is a definition of the word “benediction”: “the utterance of a blessing, an invocation of blessedness.” Why is it an appropriate title for this novel?
3. Discuss the character called Dad. Why do you think Haruf gave him that name? What does it signify?
4. What do we learn about Dad from the episode with Clayton? Why does Dad hallucinate a visit from Clayton’s wife?
5. There are many parental relationships in the novel: Dad and Mary and Lorraine, Willa and Alene, Lyle and John Wesley, for example. What makes some stronger than others?
6. Alice has many substitute mothers. Why do so many of the women want to take care of her? Who does she seem to respond to best?
7. One parental relationship in particular haunts the story: Dad and Frank. How does Dad feel about Frank at the end?
8. On page 43, Lyle counsels a couple who want to get married: “Love is the most important part of life, isn’t it. If you have love you can live in this world in a true way and if you love each other you can see past everything and accept what you don’t understand and forgive what you don’t know or don’t like.” How does this relate to his own life?
9. Why is Lyle’s sermon so inflammatory? What point is Haruf making about religion?
10. When Lyle goes out walking at night, he says he’s in search of “the precious ordinary.” (Page 162) What does he mean by that?
11. After Mary goes to Denver in search of Frank, she’s treated kindly by several strangers. What does this tell us about Mary, or about city life?
12. Lorraine has lost a child and is in an unfulfilling relationship. Do you think she’ll be happy to move back to Holt and take over Dad’s store? How do you imagine that will go?
13. Change is a theme that runs through the novel—fast change, slow change, changes in small-town living, changes in religion, changes in characters’ relationships. What larger point is Haruf making?
14. Why does John Wesley attempt suicide? Why doesn’t he go through with it?
15. What does Dad learn from the “visits” by his parents and Frank? Does Dad have regrets about his life?
16. Reread the closing paragraphs of the book. Why does Haruf end the novel this way?
17. Haruf’s language and punctuation are so plain, the writing is nearly austere. How does its simplicity contribute to the mood of the story?
18. In an interview in Publishers Weekly about Benediction, Haruf said: “In some ways, what happens in Holt happens in Denver, in Minneapolis, everywhere. Death is a fact of life, no matter where you live. Taking care of the dying is a necessity everywhere. Those are not conditions exclusive to small towns.” Did he succeed in making his story feel universal?
(Questions issued by publisher.)