An interviewer asked Kent Haruf if forgiveness was one of the main themes of his novel Benediction.
Haruf was interested in the question, but he replied that he wrote out of experience and intuition.
I envision these characters, I know what they are going to do and I don’t at all want to think about themes or central principles.
That exchange might be the best explanation I could give for why I admire Haruf’s fiction.
His characters are ordinary people who live in the fictional town of Holt on the high plains in eastern Colorado. They don’t do extraordinary things. There are no murders, drug deals or high-speed chases in the novel.
The characters do ordinary things. They get bad diagnoses. They get into arguments with people they love. They grieve. They sometimes try to mend fences.
In the opening scene of Benediction, the owner of the town’s hardware store, a fellow everyone calls ‘Dad,’ gets a bad diagnosis. He tries to settle accounts. In his dreams, he sees people he’s known and sometimes hurt. One, who knew what Dad used to think of homosexuals, asks what he thinks now.
I’m too ignorant. I don’t know nothing about it. I told you, I come off a farm in Kansas. That’s all I knew where I come from. It took all I had to get this far, a little plans town, with a store on Main Street.
You did all right, Dad. You’ve come a long way.
Not far enough.
No. That’s true. Not yet you haven’t.
It’s not a high-speed car chase. But you can find a lot of those. It’s harder to find a passage about what dying might be like.
• Sources: Kent Haruf, Benediction; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. The quotation is on p. 230.
The quotation from the interview is from Mark Stevens, “Q&A With Kent Haruf — ‘Benediction,’”; originally published March 6, 2013 in Telluride Inside … And Out. It’s on Stevens’s blog Don’t Need a Diagram:
https://markhstevens.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/q-a-with-kent-haruf-benediction/
For another note on this author, see “Kent Haruf’s ‘Our Souls at Night,’” Feb. 23, 2023.
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