Eventide by Ken Haruf

I had been saving this sequel to Plainsong for as long as I could, but in need of a pick-me-up book this weekend I finally succumbed. Eventide was good not only of its own accord but also because it reminded me how much I liked Plainsong.

This book is a continuation of the story begun in Plainsong. The book also uses many of the same literary affectations as its predecessor: conversations without quotation marks and local grammar in non-conversation descriptions. "First they set to cleaning it, as people do when they move into a new house." This made the book immediately familiar to me, despite having read probably 40+ books since Plainsong.

One of the best things about Plainsong was the surprising connections between seemingly disparate characters within the story. Prepared for this, I kept trying to figure out who would end up living with or helping out whom in Eventide, but to no avail. Thankfully, Haruf made similarly clever connections between the characters that surprised me at every turn of the page. The characters were interesting to follow, well-developed, and appropriately likable or hate-able. Their tragedies and mistakes felt like my own.

Towards the end of this book, I noticed that I was reconsidering my superiority as a capuccino-drinking therapy-going, Tivo-using blue-stater. The characters in this book (no doubt based on people Haruf has come across in his native Colorad0) are at least as good as my contemporaries are in solving problems and comforting each other. I yearned, briefly, for a simpler life in a small town.

Perhaps my only disappointment with this book was that it was exactly as good as Plainsong, for all the same reasons.