Clear, Spare and Slight: Where You Once Belonged by Kent Haruf
By: Bart Schaneman
Tags: Novel, Great Plains, Literature, Review, Kent Haruf

By Blamfoto

About 15 years ago I was a young journalist writing for my college newspaper when I reported on the author Kent Haruf receiving the key to the city of Lincoln, Nebraska. At the time Lincoln City Libraries had selected Plainsong for its One Book-One Lincoln community reading program.

I remember how impressed I was to see this man standing in a room full of admirers and feted in such a way for a book set in my part of the world.

“The hardest thing to do is to try and learn your craft while making a living,” he said that night. He didn’t get published until he was 41, working as an English teacher for the duration. “After 30 years, I’m an overnight success,” he told the crowd.

Haruf graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University, and later taught there. Yet he’s the chosen writer son of Colorado, born in Pueblo, and maybe the state’s best-known novelist. I visited a bookstore in Salida, where he died, last year that had all of his books proudly displayed.

But really to me he doesn’t belong to one state. Instead he belongs to the region between the mountains and the Midwest, the Great Plains. Holt, the small town which serves as the setting for nearly all of his fiction, is at heart a plains town.

The most recent novel of his I’ve read, Where You Once Belonged, was one of three suggested to me in a writing class I took last year as a way to inform my own fiction. I already wrote about Daniel Woodrell’s Give Us A Kiss here, and I’ve yet to read the third, Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry, but I hope to get to that soon.

It’s interesting to me how popular Haruf’s writing is in literary groups. I tend to think his sentences aren’t ornate enough for your average modern MFA writer, and he’s clearly a regionalist, a designation that’s often derided in today’s world, where no one is from anywhere.

But still, people say to me “your writing reminds me of Plainsong” and it’s always intended as a compliment. I take it as one. I’d love to write as well and as clear and spare as Haruf. His style is perfectly suited for the landscape of the Great Plains.

The region Haruf writes about, his fictional town of Holt, Colorado, is the same region I know, just three hours south of my hometown. His characters grew up slightly closer to the mountains, but even though this is Colorado, it just as easy could be Kansas or Nebraska. Consider this passage:

Sometime during those days and nights in the motel room Burdette managed to convey the impression to her that Holt was better than it is. He told her, for example, that you could see the mountains from Holt.

You can’t of course. You have to drive at least forty miles west of here to see the mountains. And then it has to be a very clear day, coming after it has rained or after the wind has blown hard for five or six hours so that the brown cloud hanging over Denver has been driven away or blown off, and then what you see of mountains is merely a faint blue jagged line on the horizon some hundred miles farther to the west.

I believe Where You Once Belonged is considered one of Haruf’s lesser novels. It was published before the book that would make his name, Plainsong, and although WYOB has more than enough moments of fine writing, it doesn’t quite range into the realm of transcendence that he achieved with his later work. It lacks much of the rural description we read in the bigger, more ambitious books. By that I mean it’s more of a town book than a country book. (But definitely not a city book.) That doesn’t make it any less viable, necessarily, just maybe lacking in those great scenes of livestock and bachelor farmers that made the other fiction work so well.

The story’s compelling enough. It’s about a guy who grew up in Holt, became something of a local legend for his size and strength and general manliness, then disgraced himself and the community with some poor behavior, left town, only to show up one day several years later as though nothing happened. It’s told by a classmate who made his life in that rural place as well, and there are many moments of poignant beauty throughout.

That night I saw Haruf get the key to Lincoln he cited Faulkner and Hemingway as his two main influences. You get much of the former’s style in the plot of the story with its tragic outcomes, and much of the latter’s in how the sentences are crafted. But the overall product is the author’s own.

It’s clear with this book Haruf knows he’s found his “postage stamp of native soil,” to quote Faulkner, and it stands to reason why he keeps exploring the lives of the people there. He knows the landscape, but, more importantly, he understands what makes people do what they do in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado. It just a shame we didn’t get more from this great writer.