A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership
*Starred Review* Like the rest of Berry’s fiction, more than 50 years of it, beginning with the novel Nathan Coulter (1960), these 20 stories are about what one of the most developed of the characters, Burley Coulter, calls the membership of Port William, a farming community in Kentucky not far south of the Ohio River. This is the author’s region, too, and decades of his family and their neighboring friends, from the Civil War era to the present, are the models for the people in his fiction. Presented chronologically, these stories span the entire period covered in Berry’s work, from 1864 to nowadays. Readers of Berry’s other fiction will know some of the narrators—humorous, independent, compassionate Burley Coulter; lifelong but by no means unromantic bachelor Jayber Crow; and quietly magisterial Andy Catlett, the most frequent storyteller and Berry’s surrogate. The incidents range from Andy’s great-great-grandmother’s face-off with a renegade soldier to Burley’s eyewitness account of the unwillingly outrageous courtship of Big Ellis to Andy’s young son Marcie’s reaction to the sudden death of Elton Penn, the finest farmer his father ever knew. The language is warm and cool, as called for; consists mostly of one- and two-syllable words; and constitutes a style as clean and distinctive as Hemingway’s, as perspicacious as Mark Twain’s. --Ray Olson