Book Report--Benediction (ii)

Kent Haruf's Benediction is the story of the death of a man named, affectionately--if one can be affectionate about him--"Dad Lewis." What Haruf wants us to believe--and I buy almost everything Haruf wants me to believe--is that a whole town, a dusty farm town called Holt, Colorado, is so intimate with the man they all call him "Dad."

You'd think, therefore, the man would be a soft touch. Think again. Pure hardscrabble.

I may be crazy, but I think I know dozens of men like Dad Lewis. Once upon a time in a writing class--I remember the room, remember the kid, too--we got in a discussion of the way in which fathers tell their sons they like 'em--shoot, sometimes even love 'em. So this farm kid gets a little riled when someone in class says that fathers don't do all that well at displaying love. "Shoot," the kid says in defense of his old man, "I know my dad does. He says, 'Now get to work,' even growls a little." He stopped for a moment. "I know what that means," he told the class. "What he means is, 'I love you."

That's what Dad Lewis thought, too; then he had a son unlike anything he ever dreamed of, a son who was gay. Dad Lewis absolutely could not imagine his own son's reality. He threw him out.

In Benediction, Dad is dying, and even though it takes him most of the month the doctor tells him he has left to admit it, what he misses more than anything is intimacy with a son who long ago swore off ever returning home. If you pick up Benediction and believe it's going to be just another version of "The Prodigal Son," put it down. It's not going to happen.

But what does happen in Haruf's third novel about Holt, Colorado, is sheer grace anyway. Nothing about Dad Lewis's life was easy, but then little is out there on the wind-driven high plains. He ran a fair-to-middlin' hardware store downtown, made himself a living, kept a couple of Holt families around with a few good jobs, and tried hard to care for his own at least.

There are perfectly human  moments in Benediction, so intimately drawn that you think you're in the room with Dad and Mary, his longsuffering wife. Dad Lewis's pilgrimage to the grave will take your breath away because the man grows bigger and bigger and bigger, even as he gets ever smaller crawling ever closer to the grave. He sits at a window where for most of his last couple weeks he looks out at a world he seems to have seen only when death itself is staring him in the face.

There's lots of laughs in Benediction, but there are tears too. I listened to the novel--for the second time, in fact--on a long drive this weekend, and more often than the Dad Lewis in me cares to admit, I was downright happy it was dark inside the car and I was alone. That's what I liked about Benediction.

I've got some short stories to read now because a magazine asked me to be a judge of stories a number of people submitted to a contest. I said I'd do it, not because I like the job but because I like the editors. Still, I'm a little scared of being a judge, even though I've done it before and I'll likely do it again, scared because I loved Kent Haruf's Benediction and I know millions of people would not. Benediction is an old man's love story, and who the heck cares about such a thing except, yeah, an old man.

There's no accounting for taste in life, is there? I watched a worship service today that looked to me like a rock concert. There were hundreds of people there, praising God. The band was beating out a rhythm that made hearts dance. It was huge. It was sheer glory.

But it wasn't for me.

Benediction was. And is.

Someplace there are a few electronic blips on a disk, an old essay I think I wrote two years ago when the novel came out, a book review. I know I wrote about it before--I know I did. No matter. On a rainy Friday night somewhere between Chicago and Michigan City, in the car I was driving, Dad Lewis died again, just like I knew he would, and when he did I was brought to tears.

You may not like the novel at all, but this old man can't think of too many books he's read in the last few years that were anywhere near as powerful.

To each his own, I guess.

Me? I cried for Dad Lewis.