Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry

Publication date: September 1, 2000

Counterpoint Press

$25.00 hardcover. 354 pages

ISBN: 1-58243-029-2

There's a spot in every community where you can take the pulse of the place. In Wendell Berry's new book, you feel it in the barber shop of Jayber Crow. For some forty years Berry has written stories about his "postage stamp" (Faulkner's phrase) of soil, the fictional Town of Port William, Kentucky. If Port William is a "world in a place," Crow's shop is its carotid artery.

Jayber, an orphan, moves away from Port William at an early age to live in "The Good Shepherd" foster home. Later, he attends a denominational college with thoughts of entering the ministry, but he has an epiphany, of sorts, when he realizes that not every word in the Bible is literally true or should be heeded. What he really wants, he thinks, is not career or covenant but to belong to community. In this novel, like most of Berry's works, community is broadly defined to include non-human nature. Crow returns home during the flood of 1937 to settle in and make his living as barber, bachelor, and oral historian.

Berry is perhaps better known as an essayist and poet than as a novelist, though he's equally adept at all three. Even with ponderings about the existence of god and familiar meditations about agriculture and small farming, Berry is a good storyteller. Through the voice of Jayber Crow, barber, gardener, philosopher himself, Berry has found a comfortable voice to narrate this tale. The book is about Crow's faithful "marriage" to his community and to a woman, Mattie Chatam, already married to someone else. Her husband Troy is the chief villain in this story, cheating on both Mattie and on the land while ushering in the era of machines and agribusiness, whose mantra is always modernize, specialize, grow. The connection is crucial for Berry, for our failure to love one another is symptomatic of our "divorce" from the land. In the end, when Mattie is sick, Troy sells off the "nest egg," fifty acres of big timber that her father had set aside, to pay off his debts. The "nest egg" is also the place where Mattie and Jayber have chance meetings and share the forest's beauty and peace.

It's an allegory: all of us orphans raised by a community we must either love, preserving its living memory and beauty, or hate, destroying it inheritance and legacy. Not too much is new here from Berry, but there is a good story told in a friendly and familiar voice in the pace of the Ohio River, patient and placid (though capable of "floods") the way nature meant it to be. Like a river that has carved its course long ago, still leaving marks but bearing few, Berry has much to teach if we will listen.