The questions who and what and how and why are no doubt useful and occasionally even noble in their place. But for Wendell Berry, whose spare and elegant prose has long testified to the rural American values of thrift and frugality, four interrogatives must seem a waste, when one will do. Where is the ultimate qualifier, the sine qua non, for both the author and his characters. Place shapes them and defines them; the winding Kentucky River and the gentle curves of the Kentucky hills find an echo in their lilting speech and brusque affections.

Jayber Crow is another story of the Port William membership, the community whose life--and lives--Berry has unfurled over the course of a half dozen novels. Jayber himself is an orphan, lately returned to the town. And his status as barber and bachelor places him simultaneously at its center and on its margins. A born observer, he hears much, watches carefully, and spends 50 years learning its citizens by heart. They were rememberers, carrying in their living thoughts all the history that such places as Port William ever have. I listened to them with all my ears, and have tried to remember what they said, though from remembering what I remember I know that much is lost. Things went to the grave with them that will never be known again. Jayber tells the town's stories tenderly. Gently elegiac, the novel charts the tension between an urge to isolation and an impulse to connectivity, writ both small and large. As the 20th century moves inexorably forward, swallowing in great mechanized gulps rural towns governed by agricultural rhythms, Port William turns in upon itself. And as Jayber admits quietly, "Once a fabric is torn, it is apt to keep tearing. It was coming apart. The old integrity had been broken." Integrity, both whole and shattered, is key to the stories of Burley Coulter, Cecelia Overhold, Troy Chatham, and above all, Athey Keith and his daughter Mattie, to whom Jayber pledges his undying and unrequited love.

Berry's prose, so carefully tuned that you never know it is there, carries us into the very heart of the land itself; his exquisitely constructed sentences suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world. Jayber Crow resonates with variations played on themes of change, looping transitions from war into peace, winter into spring, browning flood destruction into greening fields, absence into presence, lost into found. --Kelly Flynn


From Publishers Weekly
The role of community in the shaping of character is a recurring theme in the work of poet, essayist and novelist Berry, as evidenced once more in this gratifying novel set in Berry's fictional Port William, Ky. Jayber Crow, town barber from 1937 until 1969, is born in the environs of Port William, but after the deaths of his parents and, later, his guardians, he is sent to an out-of-town orphanage at the age of 10. Returning 13 years later, in the flood year of 1937, the solitary young man goes on to learn the comradely ways of the town. "In modern times much of the doing of the mighty has been the undoing of Port William and its kind," Crow reflectsAa reflection, too, of Berry's often-stated beliefs that salvation must be local, that rootlessness and a fixation on the postindustrial era's bright new toys will destroy us environmentally and economically. Crow earns his living with simple tools; he becomes a church sexton, though he is not unthinkingly pious; and his unrequited love for farmer's wife Mattie Chatham is pure and strong enough to bring him serene faith. In contrast, Mattie's husband, Troy, the novel's villain, disturbs the "patterns and cycles of work" on Mattie's family farm, trumpeting "whatever I see, I want" and using a tractor. The tractor stands for the introduction of new machinery and the unraveling of the fabric of family farming. It is not surprising when Troy cheats on his wife nor does it come as a shock when the Chatham's young daughter becomes a victim of dire chance. Berry's narrative style is deliberately traditional, and the novel's pace is measured and leisurely. Crow's life, which begins as WWI is about to erupt, is emblematic of a century of upheaval, and Berry's anecdotal and episodic tale sounds a challenge to contemporary notions of progress. It is to Berry's credit that a novel so freighted with ideas and ideology manages to project such warmth and luminosity. 12-city author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


New York Times Book Review
"Read [him] with pencil in hand, make notes and hope that somehow our country and the world will soon come to see the truth that is told here."


From Booklist
Four-year-old Jonah Crow loses both parents to the 1918 flu epidemic and is taken in by elderly relatives, both of whom die when he is 10. The foundation of love for his people and his rural northern Kentucky homeland has been deeply laid, however, and it sees him through the orphanage in which he is labeled J. Crow, the seminary in which he learns that the call he feels isn't to the pulpit, early jobs and a trek back home during the great winter flood of 1937, and into his real calling as Jayber, bachelor barber of Port William, the epicenter of all Berry's fiction. Giving dramatic structure to Jayber's memoirs, which consist mostly of anecdotes revealing his and the other Port Williamites' personalities and souls, is his long, silent love for Mattie Keith, whom he first notices, indelibly, when she is 14. She marries handsome Troy Chatham, who, trying to become an ever-grander agribusinessman, gradually wastes her inheritance, and who, perhaps partly in self-loathing, cheats on her. When Jayber sees Troy cheating, he vows to be the faithful husband he feels Mattie should have, and so he is until her death, though only he knows it. While affection and ardor suffuse this beautifully crafted novel, sentimentality and sensationalism are not in it. With the seeming effortlessness of art, Berry marries the book's host of amusing and affecting stories and characters to the practical and religious lessons he has learned and striven to communicate during his 40-year literary career. Informing all those lessons is the insight that loving care for others, both living and dead, and for God's creation redeems and justifies one's life. This may be Berry's finest book. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Returning once again to the Port William membership, Berry has written his best novel yet, a book certain to confirm his reputation as one of America's finest novelists.
From the simple setting of his own barber shop, Jayber Crow, orphan, seminarian, and native of Port William, recalls his life and the life of his community as it spends itself in the middle of the twentieth century. Surrounded by his friends and neighbors, he is both participant and witness as the community attempts to transcend its own decline. And meanwhile Jayber learns the art of devotion and that a faithful love is its own reward.

FROM THE CRITICS

Chicago Tribune

This is an important novelist with prophetic things to say and a poetic way of saying them... Jayber Crow is his best novel yet.

Bloomsbury Review

Jayber Crow belongs to the small company of truly remarkable characters in the American novel.... This is a fine novel, unforgettable and likely to send new readers of Wendell Berry off to look for his other books.

Publishers Weekly

The role of community in the shaping of character is a recurring theme in the work of poet, essayist and novelist Berry, as evidenced once more in this gratifying novel set in Berry's fictional Port William, Ky. Jayber Crow, town barber from 1937 until 1969, is born in the environs of Port William, but after the deaths of his parents and, later, his guardians, he is sent to an out-of-town orphanage at the age of 10. Returning 13 years later, in the flood year of 1937, the solitary young man goes on to learn the comradely ways of the town. "In modern times much of the doing of the mighty has been the undoing of Port William and its kind," Crow reflects--a reflection, too, of Berry's often-stated beliefs that salvation must be local, that rootlessness and a fixation on the postindustrial era's bright new toys will destroy us environmentally and economically. Crow earns his living with simple tools; he becomes a church sexton, though he is not unthinkingly pious; and his unrequited love for farmer's wife Mattie Chatham is pure and strong enough to bring him serene faith. In contrast, Mattie's husband, Troy, the novel's villain, disturbs the "patterns and cycles of work" on Mattie's family farm, trumpeting "whatever I see, I want" and using a tractor. The tractor stands for the introduction of new machinery and the unraveling of the fabric of family farming. It is not surprising when Troy cheats on his wife nor does it come as a shock when the Chatham's young daughter becomes a victim of dire chance. Berry's narrative style is deliberately traditional, and the novel's pace is measured and leisurely. Crow's life, which begins as WWI is about to erupt, is emblematic of a century of upheaval, and Berry's anecdotal and episodic tale sounds a challenge to contemporary notions of progress. It is to Berry's credit that a novel so freighted with ideas and ideology manages to project such warmth and luminosity. 12-city author tour. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Kentucky poet and novelist Berry (A Timbered Choir) brings to life the title character, an orphan from a rural river valley near Louisville in the early 20th century. When his young parents die, Jonah (later "J," "Jay Bird," and finally "Jayber") is sent to live with older relatives, Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy. They, too, die before he is grown up, and he is sent to the Good Shepherd orphanage, a grim institution where his name is shortened to an initial. After an abortive try at the ministry, Jayber wanders back to his hometown of Port William, where he is more an observer on the edge of society and yearns for local girl Mattie Chatam from afar. The richly portrayed community unfolds delicately and surely, with the human dramas of its inhabitants revealed from Jayber's perspective. A moving, lyrical work on a small canvas, this is recommended for most libraries.--Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Stephen Whited