Writers Read

What I most enjoy about reading Wendell Berry is how his uncommon wisdom masquerades as good old common sense through characters and stories set in and illustrated by the best of what rural America has to offer: honesty, freedom, and love. Reading a Berry novel is a provocative peek at the last apex of America's agricultural heyday of the mid-20th century...and the sad decline that has taken place ever since.

Like previous novels, Berry's Hannah Coulter is very much a character-driven story, only this time told from more of a first-person, memoir-esque perspective. It's interesting reading the thoughts of a woman (Hannah) as written by a man (Berry), but the story hardly suffers for it; if anything, the balance of the subjective emotion and the objective reality of Hannah's life and situation is quite intriguing.

And what is Hannah's life and situation? Born a farm girl who lost her mother at an early age, Hannah was taught life by her Grandmam. Marrying early, Hannah lost her first husband, Virgil, to World War II, but had his daughter, Margaret, soon after. Raising her daughter with the help of Virgil's family on their farm, Hannah marries another local boy, Nathan, who also served in the war, but survived to come home.

The rest of the novel is really nothing more than the telling of Hannah's story with Nathan, their three children (all of whom left the farm not to return, a sad lament theming through several of Berry's books), their neighbors (the "membership of Port William" as they called it), and their interaction and investment with their beloved land in Kenutcky. Like rural life, Hannah's story is not flashy or particularly new and original, but it is rich and deep, very much like the kind of soil that produces a good harvest year after year.

The tensions in the book - as on the farm - tend to be more against elements like the weather, modernity, and the deterioration of community as brought about by individualism and in the name of "progress" than by anything else. Life and death happen, as do many other significant milestones (marriage, children, grandchildren etc.), and Berry gives us the privilege of journeying with Hannah through all of this in a beautifully written, concise (only 168 pages) but hardly sparse way.

Personally, this was a hard book to read as I am one of those farm kids who has not (at least not yet) chosen to return to the farm. Berry's chronicling of the emotions that swirl in and around a family's land as it passes (or doesn't) from generation to generation hit close to home. In reading Hannah Coulter, I appreciated again my rural upbringing, and wondered anew what the future holds for our family, our farm, and the relationship between the two. Recommended.