“IN MOMENTS of weariness, anger, disappointment or failure, when prayer itself does not help us find inner serenity, a good book can weather the storm until we find peace of mind.” So wrote Pope Francis as recently as August, talking about the part played by of literature in the formation of a Christian life. He should know.
There’s a breadth to this which is appealing. Not just theology, or spirituality: just . . . books. And where my interests lie in the world of books is in novels. Give me a good book, a good novel, and I’m away — hard to drag me back to the here-and-now when the vegetables need preparing for lunch (my wife will vouch for this). It’s not just to weather storms, or because I can’t pray, that I read. I read novels in the hope of finding beauty, grace, and truth: some illumination about the ways of God and humanity within the pages I’m holding. And, when I find something of those qualities, the memory stays with me, marked off as “a good read”.
Much modern British writing fails to deliver that for me; so I have increasingly looked abroad to find that level of satisfaction, and, for the past 20 years or so, I’ve been impressed by the work of an American of whom most people have never heard: Kent Haruf. November 30 marks the tenth anniversary of his death at the age of 71, just when I thought he was receiving some well-deserved acclaim.
HARUF lived most of his life in Colorado, to the east of the Rocky Mountains. His first books were published when he was in his forties, by which time he had accumulated experience as a Peace Corps teacher in Turkey, a construction engineer, a hospital worker, and much else, all over the mountain states of the western US.
His Plainsong quartet (Plainsong,1999; Eventide, 2004; Benediction, 2014) and the posthumously published Our Souls at Night (2015) tell of characters in the fictional small town of Holt, on the plains a long way east of Denver, and the events that happen to them. It is much the same physical geography as Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead characters some 600 miles further east in Iowa. Or even the inhabitants of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon — settlements best seen by the Fast Set from 30,000 feet, or glimpsed as you race along the interstate highway: small, compact, neat, with outlying farms; a long way from a big city, a long way from anywhere where life is perceived with a capital “L”.
AND not too much that is out of the ordinary does happen in Holt. News of events in Holt might make it to the next settlement, but not raise excitement any further than that. These books are no thrillers, although, in the course of a story’s development, a farmer is killed, a young girl falls pregnant and her mother throws her out, a horse dies, a teacher quietly despairs, a teacher tries her best to find the pregnant teenager a home. Stuff not too far from our daily lives, communicated — in Haruf’s phrase, “simply, clearly, directly” — in prose reminiscent, at times, of Hemingway.
Some characters are exposed to events that they are not old enough, not equipped enough, to bear; but what happens does so usually without fuss, and outcomes bear the marks of decency and, if possible, of grace. As the Revd Malcolm Doney has written in this paper in his reviews of Haruf’s books, the author succeeds in the “Herculean” task, for a novelist, of making everyday good people more interesting than bad ones.
It is the storytelling fruit of a varied life, slowly cooked to bring out the savour with a ripe wisdom. These are stories of the “graced ordinary” (I’m not sure where I picked up that phrase, and the internet is no help, but it’s stuck. Certainly, Pastor Lyle in Benediction talks of “the precious ordinary”). This is the ordinary stuff of life — its challenges, and hopes — but carried out with more than a dusting of God about them.
In these quiet, unfussy books, it is a couple of old farmers, both bachelors, who live outside town and who agree to take in a troubled teenager, and, when she runs away, agree to take her back again. Or a dad trying his best as a single parent: dependable people, by and large, who don’t need convincing to do the right thing. These are books that release their magic slowly, opening up a real sense of place, where the reader comes to care about what happens to the characters and the community. So, worth following from close up rather than from 30,000 feet.
THE “graced ordinary” seems to me to be where most of us are, most of the time. Nothing much happens to us (apologies to those readers whose lives are filled with High Drama, punctuated every five minutes with exclamation marks and capital letters), but most of us try to live in grace and with grace, suffusing the ordinary with something of the fragrance of Jesus: no big scenes, no ultimate despair, but a quiet operation of grace through the day.
Not that any of this is stated, raised, or discussed in Haruf’s books, but it is foundational: part of the ground that the characters walk on. Maybe that comes from the small towns where Haruf lived all his life: his father was a Methodist minister, appointed to several livings in Colorado.
The graced ordinary is where, in our Sunday worship, most of our epistle readings lead us. The theme is invariably “The God of grace has made himself known to you in Jesus Christ, God in earthly form. Now imitate him — live lives of grace.” And the Gospel readings, with their invitation to explore the thousand meanings of any given parable, any given action of Jesus, lead us in the same direction: to a life putting grace into action; to (in a phrase attributed to Mother Teresa) “doing small things with great love”. This is the “graced ordinary” in action; and this quartet by Kent Haruf might just be the sort of books that Pope Francis was thinking about.
The Revd Roy Shaw is a retired priest in the diocese of York.