How It Went

June 1, 2022

Multi-award-bedecked novelist/poet/essayist Berry returns with a collection set in the fictional Kentucky town that's home to his autobiographical character Andy Catlett, who relates 13 stories with settings ranging from 1945 to 2001. A celebration of lives well spent and of family and friends, living and deceased.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 12, 2022
Berry (The Peace of Wild Things) offers more stories of Port William, Ky., and his frequent protagonist Andy Catlett in this expansive collection, tracing Port William’s transition from a relatively bucolic village in the 1930s to its present-day factory farms. “Time Out of Time” follows a young Andy as he spends an afternoon pursuing a squirrel through the branches of a giant tree—part of a forest that, the older Andy ruefully notes, will later be cut to the ground. “The Great Interruption” starts as a joke about a teenager in the 1930s falling out of a tree, thereby interrupting an illicit rendezvous, and then expands outward into a pensive consideration of the importance of storytelling in a community, and the impact of its loss. “Dismemberment” revolves around a more personal loss, when Andy, a 40-year-old farmer in 1974, loses his right hand to a harvesting machine and then, over the decades, comes to terms with the help of a close friend and others. Berry’s humanity and clear-eyed intelligence steer the stories away from simple nostalgia and into a thoughtful analysis of how communities inevitably change over time. This accomplished author still has much to offer.

October 28, 2022

A boy bounds from limb to limb on a journey to catch a squirrel, an aged man supervises a fence repair with great disapproval, a hilarious recounting of a child uncovering a scandalous town secret; these and 10 other reminiscences compose the newest effort from Andy Catlett and the good citizens of Port William, as delivered to readers by prolific writer Berry. Spanning eight decades, these stories provide a glimpse into the rural and seemingly quiet lives of those that, perhaps, wish to lead what many might consider a simple life. And yet many profound lessons are found in these nostalgic pages. A look back at a life that has provided source material for many novels from Berry, this collection is composed of tales both short and snappy--the first 10 stories--as well as the dense and noteworthy--the final three seemingly longer and longer (though, certainly, none go on too long). Followers of the author's previous work will no doubt love this florilegium, but no doubt this anthology has something for everyone. VERDICT A solid collection from a dependable author, for fans and nonfans alike.--Joel D. Shoemaker

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 15, 2022
Simple, lyrical, immersive stories about work, neighbors, and the land. Poet, fiction writer, essayist, and farmer: The 87-year-old Berry wears all those hats in these latest glimpses of Port William, the Kentucky community drawn from the town where he has lived for decades. The stories here span a period from the 1930s to 2021, and many feature a familiar Port William character and Berry alter ego named Andy Catlett at different points from boyhood to old age. In "A Conversation," the boy learns about work and tools from hired hand Dick Watson. In the collection's longest story, "A Time and Times and the Dividing of Time," Andy at 84 sees through his own older and boyhood eyes that Dick's work made him "more complete than almost everybody" Andy came to know. That regard for labor well done then stands out as woefully absent in "The Art of Loading Brush," when elderly Andy hires men to replace a fence only to find that the crew had "messed and blundered its way to the completion" of something merely "passable." The stories often touch on Berry's longtime crusade for sustainable agriculture, on "the departure of the people and the coming of the machines" that inhibit such farming and erode the links, the "membership," that help define a community. Berry also writes about the wit and usefulness of good stories. An episode ("The Great Interruption") in which a boy falls from a tree while spying on an amorous couple is notable mainly for its retelling afterward by the area's better yarn spinners until it becomes for Port William "a part of its self-knowledge." Berry has that gift for entertaining amid serious intent, and the many lighter, very human moments in his elegiac, cautionary, wistful stories keep them from sinking into jeremiad without diminishing his message. A fine collection by an enduring, endearing master.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from September 15, 2022
Wendell Berry's fiction and nonfiction are tightly interwoven, the fiction fleshing out the way of living that the nonfiction describes, explains, justifies, and defends. That interdependence has never been more evident than it is between The Need to Be Whole (2022) and this set of stories told by and focused on Andy Catlett, a member of the Kentucky farming community central to Berry's fiction who most resembles the author. In these stories, Andy appears as he was when the events depicted happened and also as he is now, in his upper eighties during the third decade of the twenty-first century. The stories have an overlay of evaluation and appreciation that the younger Andy in them lacked, then acquired with the years, and often the effect is akin to watching a film that uses superimposition to compress time, an uncanny and gratifying technique. One longer story is a fictional reworking of the title essay in The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings (2017) and an improvement of it. Another, deeply affecting, recounts the immediate aftermath of the loss of Andy's right hand in 1974, which was the key note in the short novel Remembering (1988), set later in his healing. Berry's longtime readers know in advance that this is a work of essential American literature.

COPYRIGHT(2022) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.