Tuning and Spring Summary

The author opens the novel with a short foreword entitled "Tuning." "If books could show more, could own more, this book would have smells," he writes, "and sounds as well." He describes the smells and sounds of a farm that are missing from the written page and tells the reader that supplying these things is a task charged to the reader's imagination.

The first full chapter of the novel is called "Spring." A young boy named Eldon lives on a farm in northern Minnesota. It is springtime, supposedly a time of renewal and awakening, but as Eldon explains, on a farm it is a time when everything starts to smell bad. The manure pile is a specific example. In the winter it freezes and does not smell. In the spring, it thaws.

The farm also gets muddy, and one...