Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry.
Counterpoint Press: Washington, D.C., 2000.
$25.00 ó 363 pages.

“This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.”

Wendell Berry’s latest book, Jayber Crow (Counterpoint, 2000, $25), is about many other things as well. It is about the levels of love that exist among human beings, from lust to friendship to the deepest love imaginable. It is about the idea of place and home in our lives. It is about small towns and the people who inhabit them, about the land and what it yields to us and what we take from it.

Jayber Crow, the barber in Port William, Kentucky, is the narrator of this fictional memoir. Orphaned at a tender age, then orphaned again when a beloved aunt and uncle die, Jayber (whose real name is Jonah) passes through several personal trials in his youth before he finds himself back in Port William. After setting up shop as a barber, he immerses himself in the community.

Here we meet the people whom Jayber has grown to love. Burley Coulter, who helped bring Jayber to Port William during a flood and who found the barber shop for him, is a big, bluff country man who is one of the town leaders and Jayber’s best friend. There is Clydie, a practical, compassionate, fun-loving woman, and Jayber’s “dear companion” for part of the book (although she is not his one true love). There are the men who visit Jayber’s barber shop, farmers and shopkeepers who take care both of Jayber and of one another.

Most of all, there is the Keith family -- Athey Keith, his wife Della, and their entrancing daughter, Mattie. Although Jayber loves Mattie Keith, she enters into a marriage with Troy Chatham, a bad union which hurts her and her children and ruins the Keith farm. Jayber stays in love with Mattie until the end of her life, feeling so passionately in love with her that he marries her within his heart, a chaste union, a pledge to love her silently that he carries to her deathbed and through the final destruction of the Keith property by Troy Chatham.

Jayber Crow is one of those books which I hesitate to recommend as highly as it deserves. For one thing, this novel is not for everyone; there is plenty of drama, but it is neither a smash-bang book of suspense nor some sort of adolescent fantasy. It is a serious work of fiction, superbly written and plotted, that tells a story of adults for adults.

This book also contains a great deal of philosophy and theology compared to much of today’s fiction. Wendell Berry, farmer, essayist, poet, and novelist, is one of America’s premier writers and thinkers, and Jayber Crow serves as a display case for his many talents. Berry meditates here on the themes that run through his essays and poetry -- the relationship between human beings and nature; the meaning of God; the place of community in our lives; and the damage that lack of community does to the human spirit. Here is just one of many passages in the book touching on these themes, a brief comment on Mattie’s marriage to Troy:

Why did she stay with him and stay loyal to him so many years until death, through so much sorrow and trouble and damage? There were two reasons, I think: She was married to him, which she took as seriously as, after all, I would have had her take it; and she understood, not just his ambition and his foolishness, his selfishness and lack of judgment, but also his fragility. She sacrificed everything to hold him together -- maybe wrongly, but I lack the intelligence (or maybe the will) to see how she might have done otherwise, once she was married to him. After all, it wasn’t just Troy himself that she was dealing with but the way of the world in her time. It would be hard to argue that one woman ought to have found a way to stand up against a whole drove of experts and their salesmen, who spoke for the way of the world and were certain that there was no other possible way.

It is this sort of writing, this belief in the permanence of the human spirit and a concomitant belief in the transience of much of what passes for riches these days, that makes Wendell Berry an American treasure.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

Back to Top

The Smoky Mountain News