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BENEDICTION

May 1, 2013
Kent Haruf

By Kent Haruf

Reviewed by Dennis Bianchi

Kent Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado. He graduated with a BA from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1965, where he would later teach, and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1973.

Before becoming a writer, Mr. Haruf worked in a variety of places, including a chicken farm in Colorado, a construction site in Wyoming, a rehabilitation hospital in Denver, a hospital in Phoenix, a presidential library in Iowa, an alternative high school in Wisconsin and as an English teacher with the Peace Corps in Turkey. Reading him, one realizes that his work-life has added greatly to his writing.  He has won many honors, including a Whiting Foundation Writers' Award, the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, the Wallace Stegner Award, and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation; he has also been a finalist for the National Book Award and other prestigious honors.  He has written novels that take place in Eastern Colorado before, including Plainsong and Eventide, both best sellers.

The protagonist of Benediction is "Dad" Lewis, a man facing terminal cancer at the age of 77.  He has owned a hardware store for many years and been married to Mary for more than half of a century.  They have a daughter and a son.  The daughter, Lorraine, now middle-aged and childless, comes home to assist her mother in caring for Dad, but the son, Frank, who has been ostracized by his father for being gay, has been out of touch with the family and has no knowledge of his father's impending death.

There are several other characters populating the story:  a minister who can't stop speaking the truth as he sees it to his congregation, despite the devastating effects to his career and family; an older woman raising her orphaned granddaughter, who is a neighbor of "Dad" and Mary; and an  elderly woman and her sixty-ish daughter, a retired-teacher.

What, one might ask, can a reader expect in the way of a novel with this compilation of characters?  I would answer that you can see a life lived with conviction and the importance of both love, forgiveness and reconciliation; all written by an enormously talented author.  I read a review comparing Mr. Haruf to Ernest Hemingway.  I don't feel compelled to argue.

The many strong qualities of "Dad" make him seem ideal, but he, too, has frailties, many of which can be attributed to his own upbringing, including a judgmental father.  His wife, Mary, seems to be the epitome of a good person, an ideal wife, particularly in the setting Mr. Haruf has chosen: the high prairies of Eastern Colorado.  As "Dad" becomes more frail she seems to become stronger and never wavers in both her duty to and love of her husband.

The new minister, on the other hand, can't help but aggravate his congregation members and his own family as well. 

Rather than explain in detail the plot, I would prefer to expound upon what I believe I read and felt in this powerful novel. Mr. Haruf unveils the many truths about human beings: their fragility and resilience; their selfishness and goodness.  Haruf isn’t describing evil so much as the frailties that defeat us: a failure to connect with one another; the lack of courage to change.

Haruf has taken ordinary people and woven an interesting and powerful tapestry of real life.  He has transformed common day-to-day situations into richly uncommon opportunities and insight, providing a sense of transparency and truth.

He awakens within the reader the idea that common people and common situations are, like common sense, not so very common at all.

I have read books about sad and mournful situations, about unhappy and unfulfilled people, but Benediction made me feel sad.  Mr. Haruf has given us both a definition of the word benediction: "The utterance of a blessing, an invocation of blessedness," and an example of just such and utterance when the minister is asked to lead the family in prayer as "Dad" is dying.  "May we be at peace together with Dad Lewis here, Lyle said softly...May this man - he stopped and spoke directly to Dad in the bed - may you leave this physical world without any more pain or regrets or unhappiness or remorse or self-doubt or worry ....May you simply be at peace."  Taken out of context that last phrase may seem less than stirring, but within the story, and in the author's talented hands the reader feels as though they were in the room, part of the family, not just saying good-bye but preparing for life afterward.

I think a warning is in order, however, and that it that this book forgoes the use of quotation marks as many newer novels have.  I am of a mixed mind regarding this as it frequently leaves the reader confused as to when the author is speaking and when the characters are speaking.  At the same time the reader will pay closer attention, which in the case of this book, is an excellent idea.