What is the author's style in Plainsong by Kent Haruf?

The point of view in the novel Plainsong comes from the perspective of an omniscient third person narrator. In the beginning of the novel, the reader cannot know if the narrator is omniscient or limited to a perspective near a principle character. Over time we see first that the narrator is able to describe the actions of characters while the principle character of the particular chapter is not present. Later, and only in a few instances, the narrator accesses the thoughts of the characters.

This distance on the part of the narrator is also in keeping with the concept of "plain" both as something unadorned and as a flat and featureless landscape. The narrator's constantly neutral tendency to report on just the tangible, observable facts and leave conjecture out of the story gives the tale a beauty and realism not found in other works with a great deal of opinion or excessive exposition.