Eventide

I recently finished Kent Haruf's Eventide. It's his follow up to Plainsong and is anchored by the same McPheron brothers, old ranch hands who live out on the plains of Colorado. Connected to them, some loosely and others intricately, are a stoic young boy and his sick grandfather, a depressed single mother and her two children, and a struggling brother and sister and their troubled parents.

Written in spare but incredibly evocative prose, Haruf returns to his familiar themes: care giving, the joys and pains of family, and the emotional connections that keep people together. Like the McPheron brothers themselves, Haruf speaks plainly and with an admirable economy of words. As a writer, he's truly a master of creating a vivid community with only a few carefully crafted sentences.

Unfortunately, it's been a few years since I read Plainsong, and many of the details of that book are lost to my terrible memory. While Eventide can and does stand well on its own, I think taken together the two books would only strengthen each other. Either way, Haruf's books are beautiful and well worth a read.