Vintage Contemporaries / Benediction

 
It was a frame house sided with clapboard, two-story with a red shingled roof, with an old-fashioned black wrought iron fence around it and an iron gate with spears and hard loops at the top. Out back was an old red barn and a pole corral grown over with tall weeds, and beyond that there was nothing but the open country.
 
He went inside to the downstairs bedroom to put on old pants and a sweater and came back out and sat down in one of the porch chairs.
 
She came out to find him. Do you want supper now? I could make you a sandwich.
 
No. I don t want anything. Maybe if you could bring me a beer.
 
You don t want anything to eat?
 
You go on ahead without me.
 
Do you want a glass?
 
No.
 
She went inside and returned with the cold bottle.
 
Thank you, he said.
 
She went back in. He drank from the bottle and sat looking out at the quiet empty street in the summer evening. The neighbor Berta May s yellow house next door and the other houses beyond it, running up to the highway, and the vacant lot directly across the street, and the railroad tracks three blocks in the other direction, all of that part of town still empty and undeveloped between his property and the tracks. In the trees in front of the house the leaves were blowing a little.
 
She brought a tray of crackers and cheese and an apple cut up in quarters and a glass of iced tea. Would you like any of this? She held out the tray to him. He took a piece of apple and she sat down beside him in the other porch chair.

Well. That s it, he said. That s the deal now. Isn t it.
 
He might be wrong. They re wrong sometimes, she said. They can t be so sure.
 
I don t want to let myself think that wa

doesn t offer us any facile reconciliations. The blessings in Benediction are [not] easily won. For that very reason they are all the more believable and all the more unforgettable. Richard Wakefield, The Seattle Times

"Splendid. . . . As the expertly crafted structure of Benediction emerges, it becomes clear that [Haruf's many] characters trace the arc of a life. . . as we join [a good but flawed man] in his deepening appreciation for those around him, while counting down the remaining hours, in his life and our own." Mike Fischer, Portland Press Herald

Remarkable. . . . Haruf paints indelible portraits of drifting days that reveal unexpected blessings. . . . We may not always recognize the best moments maybe because they are often as simple as eating off the good china at a backyard picnic but he understands their power to make us human. Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald

"Itself a blessing. . . spare and unencumbered. . . . Haruf's great skill is in describing the plain ways of people who live in small places [and the war] going on between good and evil that we recognize as part of our nature. This is what makes Benediction a universal story, not a hometown tale." Michael D. Langan, The Buffalo News

Quiet, and intimate, and beautiful. Lisa McLendon, The Wichita Eagle
 
If Hemingway had had more soul, he would've written a book like Benediction. Emma Broder, The Chicago Maroon

"Incisive, elegiac, and rhetorically rich. . . his finest expression yet of an aesthetic vision that, in spite of its exacting verisimilitude, achieves a mythic dimension rare in contemporary fiction. . . . Haruf's art is rigorous but transparent. Scene after scene, we appreciate that we are in the hands of a master of complex storytelling disguised as simple observation. . . . Reading [him], I am often reminded of the great Russian realists, who have a similar compressed intensity and who spent much of their writing time examining the lives of ordinary people living in small communities in wide-open spaces." Kevin Stevens, The Dublin Review of Books

Benediction suggests there s no end to the stories Haruf can tell about Holt or to the tough, gorgeous language he can summon in the process. Paul Elie, The New York Times Book Review

Haruf is the master of what one of his characters calls 'the precious ordinary'. . . . With understated language and startling emotional insight, he makes you feel awe at even the most basic of human gestures. Ben Goldstein, Esquire

Grace and restraint are abiding virtues in Haruf's fiction, and they resume their place of privilege in his new work. . . . For readers looking for the rewards of an intimate, meditative story, it is indeed a blessing. Karen R. Long, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Haruf is maguslike in his gifts. . . to illuminate the inevitable ways in which tributary lives meander toward confluence. . . . Perhaps not since Hemingway has an American author triggered such reader empathy with so little reliance on the subjectivity of his characters. . . . [This] is a modestly wrought wonder from one of our finest living writers. Bruce Machart, The Houston Chronicle

Both sad and surprisingly uplifting in its honest and skillful examination of death, families and friendship. Jason Swensen, Deseret News

As Haruf's precise details accrue, a reader gains perspective: This is the story of a man's life, and the town where he spent it, and the people who try to ease its end. . . . His sentences have the elegance of Hemingway's early work [and his] determined realism, which admits that not all of our past actions or the reasons behind them are knowable, even to ourselves, is one of the book's satisfactions. John Reimringer, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Reverberant From the terroir and populace of his native American West, the author of Plainsong and Eventide again draws a story elegant in its simple telling and remarkable in its authentic capture of universal human emotions. Brad Hooper, Booklist