Kent Haruf, _Our Souls at Night_

HARUF THROWS A curveball near the beginning of chapter three: "Louis never knew him well. He was glad now he hadn't." Seems unremarkable, I know, but Haruf reports so rarely on his characters' internal states--Louis's being glad of something, for instance--that it's something of a seismic event when he breaks his own rules and does so.

Haruf typically, almost exclusively, relies on what an invisible observer to his scenes would have seen and heard. We know what the characters in his later novels do and say, but only on rare occasions do we know what they think. Interiority--the natural domain of the novel for the last century and more--is a strategy from which Haruf abstains, with an almost Robbe-Grillet kind of rigor.

I am guessing that the names "Haruf" and "Robbe-Grillet" rarely occur in conjunction. Haruf is associated with plain-spoken novels about salt of the earth kinds of people who live in the broad middle of the country, not with la nouvelle roman. But even though the man did, indeed, write plain-spoken novels about salt of the earth kinds of people own the broad middle of the country, he was a slyboots, too.

Chapter 34, for instance, takes a quick dip into the metafictional when the novel's main characters, Addie and Louis, discuss heading to Denver to see the theatrical adaptation "of that last book about Holt County," the one "with the old man dying and the preacher." That is, the characters in Haruf's sixth novel are talking about seeing a play based on Benediction, his fifth. They go on to discuss his other work, including Plainsong, of which Louis says, "But I can't imagine two old ranchers taking in a pregnant girl." Louis's criticism then becomes more general: "But it's his imagination. He took the physical details from Holt, the place names of the streets and what the country looks like and the location of things, but it's not this town."

Holt, Colorado exists nowhere but in the fiction of Kent Haruf, so there's something delightfully giddy about his own fictional characters in his own fictional town complaining about him getting things wrong, as if Flem Snopes were to say, "Yoknapatawpha's not like that at all."

And even better than that is when Addie replies, "He could write a book about us."

Robbe-Grillet and Gide (or Cervantes).

When enough people notice this, Haruf is headed for the Library of America.