Plainsong Nowhere is the theme of heroism and kindness more skillfully explored than in Kent Haruf’s novel, Plainsong. Here, Haruf weaves multiple voices and story lines into a unified whole. As the book moves forward, the stark chapter headings spotlight the characters names, one after another, as if each character were stepping up to the microphone from a dark stage to give a speech before stepping back. Not until the very last chapter, whose …showed first 75 words of 896 total…

…showed last 75 words of 896 total…in the middle of the prairies of Colorado, they are outlined and magnified by the enormous, windswept emptiness around them. This causes who they are, what they believe in and how they survive, to become suddenly not just another Western story that can delight the reader, but a story of mythic proportion. It is not just a story about a small town in the American West, but also a story of universal concern. Our story.