“IN MOMENTS of weariness, anger, disappointment or failure, when prayer itself doesn’t help us find inner serenity, book can weather the storm until we discover peace of mind.” So wrote Pope Francis as recently as August, talking concerning the part played by of literature within the formation of a Christian life. He should know.
There’s a breadth to this which is appealing. Not just theology, or spirituality: just . . . books. And where my interests lie on the earth of books is in novels. Give me book, novel, and I’m away — hard to pull me back to the here-and-now when the vegetables need preparing for lunch (my wife will vouch for this). It’s not simply to weather storms, or because I can’t pray, that I read. I read novels within the hope of finding beauty, grace, and truth: some illumination concerning the ways of God and humanity inside the pages I’m holding. And, once I find something of those qualities, the memory stays with me, marked off as “ read”.
Much modern British writing fails to deliver that for me; so I actually have increasingly looked abroad to search out that level of satisfaction, and, for the past 20 years or so, I’ve been impressed by the work of an American of whom most individuals have never heard: Kent Haruf. November 30 marks the tenth anniversary of his death on the age of 71, just when I assumed he was receiving some well-deserved acclaim.
HARUF lived most of his life in Colorado, to the east of the Rocky Mountains. His first books were published when he was in his forties, by which era he had accrued experience as a Peace Corps teacher in Turkey, a construction engineer, a hospital employee, and far else, everywhere in the mountain states of the western US.
His Plainsong quartet (Plainsong,1999; Eventide, 2004; Benediction, 2014) and the posthumously published Our Souls at Night (2015) tell of characters within the fictional small town of Holt, on the plains a good distance east of Denver, and the events that occur to them. It is way the identical physical geography as Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead characters some 600 miles further east in Iowa. Or even the inhabitants of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon — settlements best seen by the Fast Set from 30,000 feet, or glimpsed as you race along the interstate highway: small, compact, neat, with outlying farms; a good distance from an enormous city, a good distance from anywhere where life is perceived with a capital “L”.
AND not an excessive amount of that’s out of the bizarre does occur in Holt. News of events in Holt might make it to the subsequent settlement, but not raise excitement any further than that. These books aren’t any thrillers, although, in the midst of a story’s development, a farmer is killed, a young girl falls pregnant and her mother throws her out, a horse dies, a teacher quietly despairs, a teacher tries her best to search out the pregnant teenager a house. Stuff not too removed from our every day lives, communicated — in Haruf’s phrase, “simply, clearly, directly” — in prose reminiscent, at times, of Hemingway.
Some characters are exposed to events that they aren’t sufficiently old, not equipped enough, to bear; but what happens does so normally without fuss, and outcomes bear the marks of decency and, if possible, of grace. As the Revd Malcolm Doney has written on this paper in his reviews of Haruf’s books, the creator succeeds within the “Herculean” task, for a novelist, of creating on a regular basis good people more interesting than bad ones.
It is the storytelling fruit of a varied life, slowly cooked to bring out the savour with a ripe wisdom. These are stories of the “graced bizarre” (I’m unsure where I picked up that phrase, and the web isn’t any help, but it surely’s stuck. Certainly, Pastor Lyle in Benediction talks of “the dear bizarre”). This is the bizarre stuff of life — its challenges, and hopes — but carried out with greater than a dusting of God about them.
In these quiet, unfussy books, it’s a few old farmers, each bachelors, who live outside town and who comply with absorb a troubled teenager, and, when she runs away, comply with take her back again. Or a dad trying his best as a single parent: dependable people, by and huge, who don’t need convincing to do the suitable thing. These are books that release their magic slowly, opening up an actual sense of place, where the reader involves care about what happens to the characters and the community. So, price following from close up reasonably than from 30,000 feet.
THE “graced bizarre” seems to me to be where most of us are, more often than not. Nothing much happens to us (apologies to those readers whose lives are stuffed with High Drama, punctuated every five minutes with exclamation marks and capital letters), but most of us attempt to live in grace and with grace, suffusing the bizarre with something of the fragrance of Jesus: no big scenes, no ultimate despair, but a quiet operation of grace through the day.
Not that any of that is stated, raised, or discussed in Haruf’s books, but it surely is foundational: a part of the bottom that the characters walk on. Maybe that comes from the small towns where Haruf lived all his life: his father was a Methodist minister, appointed to several livings in Colorado.
The graced bizarre is where, in our Sunday worship, most of our epistle readings lead us. The theme is invariably “The God of grace has made himself known to you in Jesus Christ, God in earthly form. Now imitate him — live lives of grace.” And the Gospel readings, with their invitation to explore the thousand meanings of any given parable, any given motion of Jesus, lead us in the identical direction: to a life putting grace into motion; to (in a phrase attributed to Mother Teresa) “doing small things with great love”. This is the “graced bizarre” in motion; and this quartet by Kent Haruf might just be the type of books that Pope Francis was fascinated by.
The Revd Roy Shaw is a retired priest within the diocese of York.
