Similarly, Karuf depicts the loneliness of 11-year-old DJ Kephart’s life so realistically that you want to reach into the novel and give him a hug. They’re eating a steak dinner and I’m eating beans. “They’re eating better than you and me and they’re on food stamps.” “Would you look at that,” says a man waiting in a supermarket queue as Betty and Luther load up their purchases. They clearly have “issues” - they cannot keep their trailer clean, are worried that their children may be taken into care, live on food stamps and are “micro-managed” by a kindly and patient social worker - but Haruf never casts judgement. But aside from a couple of brief references to school teachers Tom Guthrie (and his sons) and Maggie Jones, who had starring roles in the earlier novel, there’s a host of new characters in this one.īetty and Luther Wallace, a married couple living on the breadline, are beautifully depicted.
While Eventide can be read as a stand-alone novel, I think it probably helps to have read Plainsong first, if only to understand the touching back story behind Victoria and the McPheron brothers.
And there, in the kitchen of their farmhouse, was Victoria Roubideaux, the unmarried mother whom they had taken in two years earlier. This is why reading Eventide, the second in the series, was so enjoyable: from the moment I opened the first page it was like being reacquainted with old friends.Īlong with the evocative descriptions of rural Colorado - “The blue sandhills in the far distance low on the low horizon, the sky so clear and empty, the air so dry” - there were the lovely old McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, scraping their boots on the porch before going indoors. I loved the story so much that I raced through it in a matter of days and then felt completely bereft because I wanted to spend more time with those wonderful characters. Fiction – Kindle edition Picador 300 pages 2005.Ī couple of months ago you may remember that I read - and fell in love with - Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, the first in a loose trilogy of novels set in Holt, Colorado.
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