But life in Holt is going to go right on, for the sense of continuity in time is as strong as the sense of location in place. The story of Benediction, like its title, suggests closure. They are three different stories, but they have cumulative power. Occasionally he risks and once or twice falls into sentimentality: but looking at the Holt novels as a whole, his courage and achievement in exploring ordinary forms of love – the enduring frustration, the long cost of loyalty, the comfort of daily affection – are unsurpassed by anything I know in contemporary fiction.īenediction, shortlisted for Monday's Folio prize, is best read as the third of three novels linked by some recurrence of characters, but chiefly by the extraordinary presence of the town and its countryside, built up detail by detail in each book. Haruf handles human relationships with fierce, reticent delicacy, exploring rage, fidelity, pity, honour, timidity, the sense of obligation he deals with complex, barely stated moral issues, pushing perhaps towards an unspoken mysticism. The violence is common in novels at present, the compassion less so. The passions of the people of Holt, many of them loners by nature, subject to the repressive conventionality of small-town America and all the restraints of poverty, ignorance, and relentless hard work, break through sometimes in violence, and sometimes in acts of outreaching compassion.
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