This is Haruf's first novel, set in his fictional Holt, Colorado. It's a bit darker than the later stories. Although there is always trouble, and curmudgeonly behavior abounds in the rest of the Holt cycle, this story features a man whose meanness knows no bounds, and whose family is tragically doomed, in the classical sense, to endure it. Grim and unsettling in a way that reminded me of Faulkner, but was harder to deal with since I've never cared very deeply for any of Faulkner's characters, as people. Edith Goodnough, on the other hand, is a woman you'd want to rescue...a woman who has made her own choices for the noblest of reasons, and who could not have been blamed for giving a little less to ungrateful menfolk. The circumstances of her life are presented to us by a narrator who loved her and felt she should have been his mother (genetic impossibilities notwithstanding), so our sympathy is with her from the beginning. Haruf's beautiful writing and clear insight into human foibles is fully evident here but there's a suggestion of rottenness that I have not found in his other work. ( )

This book is so beautiful that it is difficult to review. Told from the perspective of Sandy Roscoe, whose father was in love with Edith Goodnough. She now lies in a hospital bed awaiting possible charges for murder. This we learn at the beginning of the book, and then the story proceeds to her very difficult life on the plains of Holt, Colorado.

This is a story of sheer hardship and the necessary decisions that are life changing.

Read it! Perhaps you will have the same feelings as I did, ie I didn't want the book to end. The characters are so stunningly portrayed that you don't want the book to end, thinking there has to be more, yet knowing that this author has a way of writing just what is necessary!

Five Stars ( )

Haruf's debut novel is so perfect that it's hard to believe he hadn't spent a lifetime perfecting this craft. Everything in it is pitch-perfect -- the demanding sandhill prairies of eastern Colorado, the tough and unsentimental people who struggle to make a living on it, and the strands of responsibility and passion that create the ties of the title. ( )

4.5 stars, rounded down.

Kent Haruf wrote quiet novels. Nothing spectacular happens to his characters, but life happens to them, just as it does to us all, and it happens to them with so much reality that it is both shocking and recognizable. The title of his first novel, [b:The Tie That Binds|126862|The Tie That Binds|Kent Haruf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320534343l/126862._SY75_.jpg|122171], evokes images of love and loyalty and family bonding, but what he delivers is a reminder that bindings are restraints and homes can be prisons. Edith Goodnough finds herself bound to a family and a hard farm that drain her, steal her life, and demand what must seem like too much sacrifice to anyone who has escaped her fate. She is beautifully strong and resilient; she finds her joys where she can find them, where, perhaps, few of us would be able to find them, in similar circumstances.

The story is told by Edith’s neighbor, Sanders Roscoe, a much younger man whose life has been entwined to hers by a father who knew her from her birth. Edith’s story is more poignant coming from Sanders, because he can tell it with sympathy and understanding, while a first person Edith would never allow herself either the pity or the explanation. When we meet her, she is an 80 year old woman, lying in a hospital bed, with an accusation of murder hanging over her head.

As I read [b:The Tie That Binds|126862|The Tie That Binds|Kent Haruf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320534343l/126862._SY75_.jpg|122171], I kept thinking of the immortal words of John Donne--”No man is an island, entire of itself.” So true, even for Edith, and yet so much of life can be led from inside, in isolation, in agony. Edith Goodnough lives such a life. So, Haruf has managed what is almost impossible. He has shown us how tightly we are linked to the other people in our lives and, at the same time, shown us how disconnected an individual can be from everyone around them.

While I would still rank [b:Plainsong|77156|Plainsong (Plainsong, #1)|Kent Haruf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388200586l/77156._SY75_.jpg|1402373] as Haruf’s masterpiece, few authors begin their careers with something as powerful as this novel. Few men understand the dynamics of farm life in close-knit but wide-spread communities in the early 20th Century so well. Few authors know how to plumb the depths of the human experience in a simple tale of a simple life, a Haruf does.


( )

After Kent Haruf's death in 2014, I mourned the fact that there would be no more books by him. Then I discovered this title that I had never read. It is a beautiful story written in Haruf's signature style.

80 year old Edith is in the hospital with a police guard outside her door. Her younger neighbor, Sandy, is approached by a reporter from the Denver newspaper trying to get a scoop on the story that brought her to this situation. Sandy will have nothing to do with the reporter, but in the first person narrative he tells us about Edith from the time she was a young girl whom his father once loved. Her abusive, narcissistic father, her peripatetic brother, and the mother who was worked to death all figure into the story.

The narrative is quiet and full of love, the tie that binds us all. ( )