A chorus of praise for 'Plainsong' is uplifting for a 'midlist' writer's soul

As he leans back in his rocking chair at his home in Murphysboro, Ill., a town where trees stand taller than buildings, Kent Haruf can hear the big city calling.

"The phone's ringing a little more than I'd like it to," the author said as he let the answering machine tally yet another message, this one from paperback publisher Vintage Books. "I've begun to screen my calls a bit."

Five years ago, the 56-year-old Haruf was just another member of that journeymen's club known as "midlist" writers. Two previous novels were out of print and a third one was proving difficult to finish. Future recognition, and money, he thought, would have to come from his job teaching at nearby Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

But "Plainsong" was completed and sold to Alfred A. Knopf, which is unlikely to let it be forgotten. Like "Cold Mountain" and "Angela's Ashes," Haruf's new novel is becoming a word-of-mouth success, catching on through the appeal of the story rather than the author's fame.

In September, independent book sellers cited "Plainsong" (Alfred A. Knopf, 301 pages, $24) as a work they're especially eager to promote. The novel has since received nearly unanimous praise from critics and a National Book Award nomination. Jessica Lange and Jonathan Demme are among those interested in movie rights, and Vintage next year will reissue Haruf's first two books.

That much luck would be unthinkable for the characters in Haruf's novels, all set in a rural Colorado community where just having a warm bed can be a blessing. It's also a head-scratcher for the author himself, a preacher's son for whom fame is as odd, and as unsettling, as a Martian's handshake.

"I had no great expectations about the book at all," Haruf said, his voice low and even. "In fact, many times during the writing I was kind of in despair about it. This is all pretty surreal."

"Plainsong" is based in Haruf's fictional Holt, Colo., a composite of the three Colorado towns where the author grew up. Like Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," a book Haruf admires, the narrative circulates among a variety of small-town residents. They include a pregnant teenager, a high school teacher and his two young sons and two

aging bachelor-brothers isolated on the

family farm.

As in Haruf's previous novels, the prose is understated, the tone forgiving; judgments are left to the reader. In place of statements, the author tends to details. When people go to the store in his books, you know what they're wearing, what they bought, what kind of car they drove and what the color of the sky was.

Kent Haruf reads from "Plainsong" at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at The Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St.; 206-624-6600.

"It seems very important for me to get the physical details right of where people live: what they're doing, what the weather is," Haruf said. "I think weather has an enormous influence on what people do in rural America. I'm always striving to make things concrete and accurate and visceral."

Praising his parents as lovers of books, Haruf said he read all the time as a child. He attended Nebraska Wesleyan University, a small liberal arts college. After two years in the Peace Corps in Turkey, he returned to the United States to fine-tune his fiction at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop.

"He was a quiet, reserved, but friendly guy and when he said something it had resonance," said novelist Ron Hansen, who studied with Haruf at Iowa. "He was older and seemed more assured about what he wanted to do as a writer.

When he turned in manuscripts everybody was impressed and a little awestruck by the quality of the prose. He seemed like a master craftsman already."

Haruf said his undergraduate reading of Hemingway and Faulkner changed his life and that he often goes back to their books. Hemingway's style inspired Haruf to write cleanly, directly. From Faulkner, Haruf felt he had been granted license to take his stories out of the city.

"There's an indication among some writers that rural people are less intelligent and less complex. Faulkner never does that," Haruf said.

Haruf no longer goes to church, but he keeps a private faith in the "elemental virtues" of "courage, loyalty, a kind of concentrated, deliberate way of living one's life, the discounting of what seems to be faddish or temporary. And love, in some non-gushy, non-saccharine way."

"The Tie That Binds," his first novel, was published in 1984, winning a Whiting Writers' Prize and finishing as a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award for first fiction. His next book, "Where You Once Belonged," came out six years later.

The author has his own way of going about his work. On first drafts, for example, he literally writes blind: turns off the lights, removes his glasses, pulls a cap over his eyes and lets nothing -- grammar, spelling, continuity -- distract the transmission from mind to manual typewriter.

Years of thought precede this. Haruf likes to allow time for an idea to grow inside before putting it down on paper. For "Plainsong," he took a childhood memory and slowly embellished it into the lives of the two brothers on a farm.

"At one of the churches my father preached there were two old bachelor-farmers who came every Sunday in their black suits. They were very shy. I knew nothing about them except that they were farmers," he said.

"That condition of life has been in my mind for 50 years. My brother and I used to think that would be ideal -- to live out in the country and not be bothered by women or parents, to kind of go as you want to."

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