It wasn’t any of that deep-black-topsoil country with forty inches of annual rain-fall and good drainage and plenty of hardwood close by-burr oak and black walnut-for lumber and fuel. In Haruf’s first novel, The Tie That Binds (1984), the Holt County region is described principally by what it was not, in the dismayed eyes of homesteaders pushing westward from Iowa in 1896: (“Plainsong: the unisorous vocal music used in the Christian church from the earliest times any simple and unadorned melody or air.”) Northeastern Colorado isn’t the West of spectacular Rocky Mountain vistas but a countryside of grim, featureless, and often arid distances. It’s a “song” of the plains recounted in a very plain style. Plainsong is an inspired title for this spare, uninflected novel, the third in a sequence of novels by Kent Haruf set in the high plains of Holt County, Colorado, approximately one hundred fifty miles due east of Denver.
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