''Eventide'' is that kind of multi-course repeat performance. I'm reminded of a friend who was once so smitten with a three-course restaurant dinner that after dessert he ordered all three courses again. Haruf's new novel, ''Eventide,'' is a sequel to ''Plainsong,'' and it will come as a familiar gift to those legions of readers - maybe an overly familiar gift. Like antique reproductions, ''alternative'' country music and the Slow Food movement, ''Plainsong'' was a life raft for people who felt they were drowning in the sour froth of pop cynicism. If readers found the novel's moral clarity refreshing, they warmed even more to its aesthetic clarity. Both Haruf and the items in that catalog draw inspiration from visions of a more durable, hand-hewn past, and both willfully emit the horsey, old-leather scent of an America that may or may not be apocryphal.

What endeared them to Haruf's plainspoken, muslin-textured novel, a 1999 National Book Award finalist that chronicled a year in the life of a small Colorado town, was its ''rustic lines,'' its ''traditional sensibility'' and ''enduring style,'' its ''aged patina'' and ''sense of being at the center of family life,'' not to mention its quiet resemblance ''to authentic Shaker furniture.'' Save for that last line (which came from a USA Today review), I'm not quoting from ''Plainsong'' raves these come from descriptions in Pottery Barn's early summer 2004 catalog. I can't support this with demographic particulars, but here goes: many of the same readers who were drawn to Kent Haruf's best-selling novel, ''Plainsong,'' are equally drawn to Pottery Barn furniture.

Plainsong by kent haruf review