“Benediction – the
utterance of a blessing, an invocation of blessedness” is the epigraph that
opens Kent Haruf’s new novel. When I read the last
page of this gem, I felt the "invocation of blessedness" in getting to share in the life of the quiet
community Haruf has created in Holt, Colorado, also the setting of his acclaimed
novel Plainsong. Like Plainsong,
Benediction is replete with everyday characters capable of stealing your
heart.
The main character, Dad Lewis, gets the news that he has
terminal cancer in the book’s opening lines: “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.”
When Dad and his wife,
Mary, return from the doctor, she takes him a tray of food and a bottle of
beer.
“He looked at the beer bottle and held it
in front of him and took a small drink.
I might get me some kind of better grade of beer before I go. A guy I was talking to said something about Belgian beer. Maybe I’ll try some of that. If I can get it around here.
He sat and drank the beer and held his wife’s hand sitting out on the front porch. So the truth was he was dying. That’s what they were saying. He would be dead before the end of summer. By the beginning of September the dirt would be piled over what was left of him out at the cemetery three miles east of town.”
I might get me some kind of better grade of beer before I go. A guy I was talking to said something about Belgian beer. Maybe I’ll try some of that. If I can get it around here.
He sat and drank the beer and held his wife’s hand sitting out on the front porch. So the truth was he was dying. That’s what they were saying. He would be dead before the end of summer. By the beginning of September the dirt would be piled over what was left of him out at the cemetery three miles east of town.”
Everyone in Holt
calls Dad Lewis “Dad” even the employees at the hardware store he’s owned for
decades. It’s an apt moniker as hardware
store owners remain among the few who listen to our problems and offer us
simple solutions or force us to face the reality that we might just need a
bigger fix – just like our own “Dads” or the “Dads” we wish we had. Haruf’s
writing provides the gift of making us feel that a man like Dad is someone we'd like in our own lives - well, most of the time.
Food is an
essential element in Benediction. In towns
like Holt, people still bring food when someone is ill, still sit down together
for meals, still have potlucks at church, and still tell people they love them by
bringing them a covered dish. When Mary
ends up hospitalized with exhaustion, neighbor, Berta May, arrives at Dad’s
door with a plate of food and questions: “Are you sick or something? Are you
going to die?” That’s how it is in Holt,
Colorado; people get to the point and they take care of one another.
After Mary’s
hospitalization, daughter Lorraine comes home to help. She’s still not over the death of her own
daughter at the age of sixteen in a long ago accident. Her marriage isn’t strong and she’s had no
recent contact with her brother, Frank, who’s long been estranged from their
father. Dad’s health fails and he begins
to sit and watch the world from his window while contemplating the mistakes
he’s made and savoring the love of the people around him. That Haruf has been a hospice
volunteer is evident in the care with which he depicts the process of
dying, death, and the details of lovingly caring for the terminally ill.
Neighbor Berta
May has taken in her eight-year-old granddaughter, Alice, after her mother’s
death from cancer. Lorraine is drawn to the child but young Alice sees parallels
in Dad’s condition that bring back painful memories so she tries to avoid the
Lewis family. The Johnson women, an old widow and longtime church friend and
her daughter, begin helping out and they take Alice on picnics, out for
ice cream, and buy her a bicycle that allows her freedom and burgeoning happiness.
The community
church’s new pastor who’s been sent to Holt as a last-ditch maneuver for his
“inappropriate” sermons offers companionship but then commits the cardinal sin
of preaching on the Sermon on the Mount and expecting his congregation to
believe it. “People don’t want to be disturbed.
They want assurance. They don’t
want to come to church on Sunday morning to think about new ideas or even the
old important ones.” They certainly
don’t want to be told to turn the other cheek and love their enemies. They call Pastor Lyle a terrorist and can’t
understand why he doesn’t hate Muslims as they do. Only the Johnson women and a rule-bound usher
stand by the pastor and the reader sees that Holt, like places everywhere,
isn’t utopia. Holt is a metaphor for the
universality of cities, small towns and suburbs where everyone must deal with
living, dying, and accepting the hand we’ve been dealt.
It’s easy to see
that Haruf grew up as a preacher’s kid in a small town like Holt where people
love and take care of each other but are often bound by the chains of small
ideas, rules, and fear. The minor
characters sins loom over the landscape and provide the reader with a deeper
understanding of Dad and this community he so loves. My favorite play, Our Town, always reminds me that nothing matters more than this
day. Benediction
offers the same reminder wrapped in a package that allows us to see it
clearly.
Summing it Up: Kent Haruf is the master of the quotidian:
celebrating and sharing the lives of ordinary people doing ordinary
things. Read this novel to share in the
rhythm of the land and the people and to rejoice that there are still writers
who carry us with them into a world both completely familiar yet new enough to
stun us into contemplating our own lives.
Haruf’s writing is grace personified.
Rating: 5 stars
Category: Fiction, Five Stars, Gourmet, Grandma’s Pot Roast,
Soul Food, Book Club
Publication date: February 26, 2013
Reading Group Guide: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/219368/benediction-by-kent-haruf#discussionquestions
What Others are Saying:
The Boston Globe: http://bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2013/02/23/book-review-benediction-kent-haruf/uCct8vWp22cJh4GQ728jgL/story.htm
Denver Post: http://www.denverpost.com/books/ci_22592569/book-review-benediction-by-kent-haruf
Kirkus Interview: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/rural-lives-urban-problems/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=cta&utm_campaign=032013
Kirkus Interview: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/rural-lives-urban-problems/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=cta&utm_campaign=032013
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