Benediction by Kent Haruf

Benediction

By Kent Haruf

I just finished reading the novel Benediction by Kent Haruf.  My initial reaction is mixed.

I chose this book because the subject matter, life and death, have been on my mind a lot lately. The first week of December, on a Tuesday night, I got the call that a dear friend and surrogate grandmother had passed away. Wednesday morning I received an email that my uncle had passed. Finally, my father has stage five terminal cancer, though he is doing fairly well at the moment. You would think that would make me run from the story of a father dying of terminal cancer but all of this drew me toward it.

I’ve done a lot of writing considering all of this and I’m still looking for answers. I am the youngest of five at age thirty-nine. At this point in my life, I feel less certain about whether our consciousness survives after death. I was once secure in my faith and beliefs but now I’m not so certain.

There were a couple scenes in Benediction that hit me hard and really moved me.

Dad Lewis has just been told he is dying of cancer, and it’s going to happen quickly. His wife, Mary, is wearing herself out taking care of him all alone and she passes out. When he gets down on the floor beside her, scared for her, I cried. The prose is sparse and honest.

He got down on his knees beside her and felt her head. She felt hot. He pulled her toward him and slid his arms under her, propping her up against the couch. Can you hear me? I got to call somebody. I’ll be right back. She made no sign. Is that all right with you if I leave a minute? I’m coming right back. He hurried out to the kitchen and called the emergency number at the hospital. Then he returned and got down on the floor again and held her and talked to her softly and kissed her cheek and brushed back her damp white hair and patted her arm and waited.

Another scene was when the preacher gets up in front of the church and tells the congregation that Christ’s sermon about turning the other cheek wasn’t just a metaphor but something that we need to live even in these turbulent times.  The majority of the congregation don’t take that so well.

But then he was abruptly halted. Someone out in the congregation was talking. Are you crazy? You must be insane! A man’s voice. Deep-throated. Angry. Loud. Coming from over on the west side of the sanctuary near the windows. What’s wrong with you? Are you out of your mind?

Now, this was only the second book that I’ve read from the modern era that did not use quotes to set off dialogue. It wasn’t totally foreign to me but to be honest I wasn’t aware that there were a number of authors doing this.

I thought the lack of quotation marks was difficult to follow at first in Benediction but I was soon okay with it. It gave the book an internal and even timeless feeling, as if looking at events that happened through frosted glass.

I wondered why someone would choose not to use quote marks to delineate dialogue so I did a quick search online and found an article from Lionel Shriver on the Wall Street Journal. Apparently a number of modern authors, including James Frey, Kent Heruf and Cormac McCarthy are popularizing the trend.

Shriver contends “By putting the onus on the reader to determine which lines are spoken and which not, the quoteless fad feeds the widespread conviction that popular fiction is fun while literature is arduous.”

I also came upon a discussion by authors on this topic that pointed me to an interview Cormac McCarthy had done with Oprah some years ago in which he said that, “If you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.”

Here’s one of my prime problems with it. I have no problem reading dialect and dialogue without quotation marks. I’m a very fast reader and can adapt. However, I know people that cannot read dialect at all, can’t read Mark Twain. Their brains simply don’t translate the written word into sound in their head. Writing is about communicating. Anything that gets between the reader and the story inhibits that communication. Now, I know that not every book is for every reader but my goal as a writer is to make things more understandable, not to obfuscate.

I asked my writer’s group about this last night. One of the group said that a good story will not be brought down by poor grammar or punctuation. Another member said she wouldn’t be able to get past the first few pages. Yet another threw something on the floor in disgust and said that it was sheer laziness on the author’s part.

I think I’ll continue to use quotation marks in writing dialogue but I won’t reject a book right away if the author doesn’t use them.

Honestly, after reading the ending, I set down the book and thought, what the hell was that? The ending really just didn’t seem consistent with the rest of the book to me. I’m going to have to puzzle on it for a while longer, but I did enjoy the book. It was about life. Death is part of that too. I didn’t find any answers, but I did enjoy the time spent on it.