Wendell Berry (The Need to Be Whole) has never hidden behind his stories; the land and people of Port William, Ky., have always been his land and his people. This truth is perhaps never more obvious than in Marce Catlett, where an elderly Andy Catlett looks back along the long line of his life and that of his father and grandfather, to the story that "has held them together like a living root of the same tree."
The story is of their 1906 tobacco crop--of Marce Catlett's long, slow trip to Louisville, where their tobacco will be sold. The auction's sole buyer pays mere pennies on the pound, leaving them unable even to cover the cost of its sale by the proceeds. Berry titles this first section "The Past," and the remaining section "The Future," but the story of that 1906 crop lives ever-present in Andy Catlett's life.
Andy Catlett's life mirrors Berry's own: his lawyer father, his love of books, his departure from and sure return to the Kentucky landscape that captured his heart in youth. At times, Berry's voice is nearly strident, a bitter mourning for a life destroyed by "the all-out industrialization of rural America." At others, he tenderly details the long year's work of raising and bringing in a tobacco harvest, calling it "beautiful at every step and stage." So when Andy "prays his benediction and farewell," readers will also hear that of Berry; "his requiem" for "the way that once lived among them, the paths worn and wearing day by day, that connected them during a lifetime to one man's effort and desire." --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian