Take It Into Town, Happy Happy

Jonathan Miles and Michiko Kakutani both reviewed Eventide, the sequel to Kent Haruf's acclaimed Plainsong, for the Times this week. Both concluded Haruf is to a certain extent repeating himself, but Miles is much harsher, pointing out several cases where the author almost repeats himself word for word and dismissing a pair of secondary characters as "archetypes of poor white poverty, exhumed from the archives of socialist fiction." He thinks Haruf has taken most of the shadowy elements out of his fiction to accentuate the shiny happy bits readers will presumably like, and he thinks the novel suffers for it.

Kakutani, however, thinks "Mr. Haruf makes us care about these plain-spoken, [sic] small town folks without ever resorting to sentimentality or clichés." Though she admits his sophmore effort is "lacking the fierce originality of Plainsong," she finds "the haunting appeal of music" within it--perhaps exactly the kind of reaction that Miles might regard as critical mush.