Eventide (Haruf)

Book Reviews
If a sense of deja vu dogs the reader of this book, the novel also showcases the qualities that made Plainsong such a seductive performance. It's not just that readers of Plainsong will want to find out what has happened to Raymond and Harold McPheron and their neighbors. It's that Mr. Haruf makes us care about these plain-spoken, small town folks without ever resorting to sentimentality or cliches. Instead, he uses their own language — simple, laconic and uninflected with irony or contemporary slang — to capture the mood and mores of the town.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

This bleak, compassionate book takes up where the author’s widely acclaimed novel Plainsong left off, in the windy high-plains country in and around the tiny town of Holt, Colorado. Distress is general: out on their ranch, two stolid elderly brothers discover loneliness after the wayward girl they took in leaves for college; various troubles—illness, death, basic inability to cope—afflict the adults in town; and some young children are set adrift from disintegrating homes, with dangerous consequences. Every action in Holt casts a long shadow, and the gist of Haruf’s story is what happens when those shadows touch. (The results are equal parts grace and calamity.) It’s rare that such slow, deliberate prose is this highly charged, but Haruf’s writing draws power from his sense of character—its limitations and its possibilities—and how it propels action.
The New Yorker

In creating a place whose people are tethered to each other by history and emotion as much as place, Haruf's work is now competing with Faulkner's Mississippi, Sherwood Anderon's Midwest, and Wallace Stegner's northern California.
Mark Athitakis - Chicago Sun-Times

This hardscrabble story kicks up a dust cloud of melancholy that will sting even the most hardened readers' eyes. At the end of some chapters I was left wondering, Who in America can still write like this? Who else has such confidence and such humility?
Ron Charles - Christian Science Monitor

This novelist writes with such unabashed wonder before life's mysteries, such compassion for frail humanity that he seems to have issued from another time, a better place.
Dan Cryer - Newsday

Haruf's follow-up to the critically acclaimed and bestselling Plainsong is as lovely and accomplished as its predecessor. The aging bachelor McPheron brothers and their beloved charges, Victoria and her daughter, Katie, return (though Victoria quickly heads off to college), and Haruf introduces new folks-a disabled couple and their children, an old man and the grandson who lives with him-in this moving exploration of smalltown lives in rural Holt, Colo. Ranchers Raymond and Harold McPheron have spent their whole lives running land that has been in their family for many generations, so when Harold is killed by an enraged bull, worn-out Raymond faces a void unlike any he has ever known. His subsequent first-ever attempts at courtship and romance are almost heartbreaking in their innocence, but after some missteps, he finds unexpected happiness with kind Rose Tyler. Rose is the caseworker for a poor couple struggling so dimly and futilely to better their lives that it becomes painful to witness. Children play crucial roles in the novel's tapestry of rural life, and they are not spared life's trials. But Haruf's characters, such as 11-year-old orphan DJ Kephart, who cares for his retired railroad worker grandfather, and Mary Wells, whose husband abandons her with two young girls, maintain an elemental dignity no matter how buffeted by adversity. And while there is much sadness and hardship in this portrait of a community, Haruf's sympathy for his characters, no matter how flawed they are, make this an uncommonly rich novel. Readers will find that what made Plainsong a bestseller-its humanity, its grace and its moving, heartfelt story-shines again in Eventide.
Publishers Weekly

(Audio version.) While some characters in this novel are holdovers from Haruf's extremely well-received Plainsong, listeners need not be familiar with the earlier book to become quickly engrossed in the goings-on of these small-town Colorado folk. It is through the author's grace as a writer that we care about every life he touches, no matter how trivial or earth-shattering their concerns, regardless if they are the center of attention or make a cameo appearance. Haruf does a marvelous job of bridging the generations, giving new meaning to words such as friendship and family. There are many different stories here, and Haruf's narrative follows no preset sequence, but listeners should have no trouble picking up the threads. A lot happens in less than a year, but nowhere does he give in to easy melodrama; it's as if we're sitting around a table in a warm country kitchen, eavesdropping on the stories of close and trusted friends. Eventide is highly recommended for all collections. —Rochelle Ratner.
Library Journal

This novel picks up where Plainsong left off, with clear, quiet prose evoking the Holt, Colorado, landscape and dialogue as unassuming and simple as the characters. Readers need not have read the first book, however, to enjoy this one because the threads of those interwoven stories are picked up and joined with the strands of new characters' lives. Victoria, a young unwed mother, leaves the McPheron's ranch, where she was kindly taken in when she was pregnant, to go to college. Shortly afterward, Harold McPheron is killed by an angry bull, and Raymond is left to find his way in the world without his brother. Eventually he meets Rose, a kindhearted social worker who gives Raymond a new lease on life. Meanwhile Rose grapples with a difficult case involving Betty and Luther, inadequate parents who cannot keep Hoyt, Betty's uncle, from abusing their two children. Hoyt also turns his cruelty on DJ, a quiet young man saddled with caring for his surly grandfather and whose only friend is Dena. After her mother's preoccupation with her failing love life results in a car accident that badly scars Dena, she and her family suddenly move away, leaving DJ alone once more. Older teens will appreciate the continuation of these simply told stories, but they might be disappointed that Victoria's story is not as much of a focus this time around. Nonetheless the characters are engaging and their stories beautifully told. Haruf skillfully reveals the importance of intergenerational relationships and the powerful influence that the young and old can have on each other. He also perfectly captures the pace and feel of small towns that brim with life despite their size, transforming the town of Holt into a character to be cherished, remembered, and loved. (Hard to imagine it being any better written. Adult-marketed book recommended for Young Adults).
Valerie Ott - VOYA

Haruf sings the second verse of his moving hymn to life on America's great plains. Eventide is a sequel to the 1999 Plainsong, Haruf's wonderfully straight-talking debut novel about life and work in and around Holt, Colorado, a withering town long miles from Denver and light-years from the coasts. Some of the characters from that first story return in major and minor roles. Harold and Raymond McPheron, a pair of aging bachelor brothers who work the ranch on which they were born, take center stage, and the Guthries, schoolteacher Tom and his motherless boys, move to the wings. Victoria Roubideaux, the young high-school girl who moved in with the McPherons to escape her mother and find refuge during her pregnancy is moving off to Fort Collins with her daughter to go to college. The ranchers, who dearly love her and her daughter, will be bereft in their absence but they have made the move possible. They resume their hard, lonely work, setting great store by Victoria's weekly phone calls. In town, three small families are finding their own hard lives harder. Welfare recipients Betty and Luther Wallace, a couple who should probably be in a group home, are unable to protect their two children either from schoolyard cruelty or from Betty's sadistic prison-bound uncle Hoyt. Mary Wells and her two daughters are living on money sent from Mary's husband in Alaska, but the marriage is broken and Mary will lose her pride and her domestic order. Down the street, ten-year-old DJ Kephart has sole care of his grandfather, a retired railroad man close to the end of a tough life. DJ's sole comfort is his friendship with Dena Wells, Mary's elder daughter. When a bad-tempered bull kills Harold McPherson, Raymond is nearly numb, leaving him vulnerable to—of all things-romance. Melancholy truths set to gorgeous melody.
Kirkus Reviews