# 2 Where you Once Belonged Kent Haruf

With a title like Where you Once Belonged you can't go in expecting much in the way of happy, which isn't all that surprising with Haruf; however, for some reason the end of this novel comes off like a sucker punch you watched connect with the side of your face, slow motion, in the reflecting window in front of you - which still lays you out.

The story is primarily Burdette's, the town bad boy and one time hero, told from the perspective of Arbuckle, conveniently enough, the town newspaperman. It opens with Burdette returning to Holt, Colorado after an eight year hiatus that the reader learns over the course of the next 150 or so pages was time spent on the run. The narrative moves back and forth from the present to long ago and recent past. It is full of well-developed, yet stunted, secondary characters. It is a novel in which the newspaper man spends his time watching a town where everyone is watching someone else. all. the. time.

Haruf's narrative is so successful for two reasons, in my humble. First, the narrator is true to form in his reportage of the events surrounding Burdette. The details of his story unfold as if they were told in an extended newspaper article, or a story and it's follow up. The level of detail never surpasses the barest facts, and while Haruf provides plenty of information from which the reader may draw all sorts of conclusions about the main character, the narrator never connects those dots for you.

Second, the parts that aren't centered on Burdette are told in similar prose, and yet, they come across more like the stories sisters share when they return to their home town for the holidays. The kind of catching up gossip that we all hear. And therein lies the rub. It is in the telling of these small details of the secondary characters that the tragedy of the book is driven home. These are sad, wandering, stilted human beings stuck spinning - cogs in the wheel - and we know them. Equally important, they know us. They tell our stories in the same broad strokes that we tell theirs and they draw the same conclusions we draw. That's the kind of sad with which this novel leaves you. The dull ache of hurt under the hand at your cheek three seconds after the punch you saw coming lands.