Benediction (Haruf) - Book Reviews

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