Works of Love in Nebraska

Wayne Booth

  • Plains Song: For Female Voices by Wright Morris
    Harper and Row, 229 pp, $9.95, January 1980, ISBN 0 06 013047 4

One of America’s three most important living novelists – I’ll let you name the other two – has just published one of the best of his novels. Unlike any other first-class novel we’re likely to see this year, Plains Song sings of life on the American plains. To sing, in the 1980s, about life on the American plains does not exactly put one into the mainstream of American letters. But the pun in Morris’s title is profoundly right: there is, after all, a ‘mainstream’ more enduring than fashions, and this plainsong laments and celebrates lives which in their frequent losses and occasional joys are far less provincial – well, than whatever novel is busting blocks in the week when this review appears. Because Wright Morris accompanies his characters’ beautiful, spare descants with his own loving reminders of why each transient life embodies permanent meaning, we always know that this is not a ‘regional novel’, just as it is not a satiric rejection, like Flaubert’s, of the customs of the provinces.

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[1] The Man Who Was There (1945), The Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948), The World in the Attic(1949), The Works of Love (1952), The Field of Vision (1956), Ceremony in Lone Tree (I960), Flee Sermon (1971), A Life (1973), and now, Plains Song. Most of these works are available only in second editions, from the University of Nebraska Press. Some are photo-texts – embodying pictures.

2. Real Losses, Imaginary Gains (collected short stories, 1976). The title does not mean that the gains are illusory.

3. His other books of critical essays are The Territory Ahead (1958), A Bill of Rites, A Bill of Wrongs, A Bill of Goods (1968) and About Fiction (1975).