Where You Once Belonged by Kent Haruf is a quietly great book. Haruf creates a very normal small town and relates what happens when the rules of the town are broken by one of the town’s own; when one of those “belonging” goes too far before anyone takes notice and after it is too late. Haruf’s town is a little place in Colorado, far from a view of the mountains — nothing dramatic in this place – and complete with good old boys, nice girls, hard-working farmers, a local cafe for coffee and gossip, and a high school football team for local pride.
Haruf’s narrator, Arbuckle, editor of the local paper, tells the story of hard-hearted boy Jack Burdette. Burdette is a child of the town, a troublemaker from early on but also almost the town mascot, with his antics, his athletic prowess, his boldness. He is allowed his transgressions because no one can see imagine his future, no one can fathom his lack of caring for anyone else. They are decent folk, they follow the rules, and they assume Burdette will too, one day. They ignore the signs of his psychopathology and instead see the football player, the grain elevator manager, the poker player. He does bad things, unexpected things that seem unimportant but add up to a pattern of taking what he wants when he wants it. With soft charm and hard entitlement, he acts to satisfy his own needs and people give in or look the other way or laugh it off. The townspeople falter and fail to muster the response that might just shut him down.
The bad boy just keeps on, using people up, taking what he wants, and no one can stop him. Part of it is that he himself doesn’t seem to understand or enjoy his own power. Charming and pushing to take what he wants is just is who he is, and he goes along with it. When he commits a crime against the whole town and disappears, there is anger, desire for vengeance, and eventually, a kind of relief that he’s gone. But then he comes back.
Karuf uses details of the normal and quiet daily life of the town to make us care about the characters. He draws us into their modest efforts to find happiness within the rules of the community and when it is denied them, we feel for them. Incapable of acting too aggressively for themselves, they cannot understand the monster in their midst until it is just too late and even then they underestimate him. It is all very believable because of the normalcy of the situation, the unconscious craftiness of the antagonist, the decency of people like Arbuckle. But decency won’t save anyone, not in this town.
Underneath the telling of the story, the story of a man and a town, there is a constant current of sorrow and resignation. Ripples of hope and possibility appear, then fade away. Doom, invisible and suffocating, drives this book. Because the doom is invisible to the decent people of this little town, it is hard to fight against; because the doom is suffocating, they cannot escape. This is a powerfully quiet book about what happens in a normal little town when the rules fall away.
