Jayber Crow
The questionswhoandwhatandhowandwhyare 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.Whereis 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 Crowis 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 Crowresonates 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--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.