High Plains Drifter

Kent Haruf's previous novel wasn't just a book. It was a cause. When Plainsong was published five years ago, its gentle but indelible tale of people getting through life on the high plains of Colorado was adopted with a passion by independent booksellers, the same ones who had pushed Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain up the best-seller list. They did the trick for Plainsong too, which eventually was also nominated for a National Book Award.

As it turns out, Haruf wasn't done with the little town of Holt and its striving, melancholy folk. His new novel, Eventide (Knopf; 300 pages), picks up their stories about 18 months later and follows them through an eventful autumn, winter and spring. The old bachelor McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, are now contending with the departure of Victoria Roubideaux, the pregnant teenager who came to live with them in Plainsong and has moved with her toddler daughter to another town to start college. There's a new focus on the slow-witted Luther and Betty Wallace, whose grasp of fundamental life skills — bill paying, food shopping, child rearing — is poor enough to put both of them forever in the keeping of cops and social workers. At separate points in the story, Betty's quick-tempered uncle and her bitter teenage daughter from an earlier liaison come to join them in their cluttered trailer. Trouble ensues.

All of this takes place within the perennial court of inquiry that is small-town life. The meticulous carpentry of Haruf's prose, all those spare run-on sentences, owes debts to Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. Haruf's words lend weight to the takeout-pizza boxes and so forth of modern Colorado. So is it churlish to point out that behind the facade of its steadfast language, this is a fairly sentimental book? And one too much in thrall to its own lugubrious music, which is no substitute for narrative drive. It's a fine line between gravity and listlessness. Time and again Eventide drifts gently across it.