Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story

“Love and duty are the animating agents of Mr. Berry’s tremendous body of writing, which includes poetry, essays and the linked novels and short stories that are colloquially known as the Port William series . . . Mr. Berry captures a range of the human comedy in his provincial setting . . . His writing conjures the connectedness and simple moral clarity that the people of Port William imperfectly aspire to. And while Marce Catlett is in many ways a lament for an ‘oldfangled’ lifestyle that now persists only in stories, it arrives at another of this author’s favorite words. That is ‘thanks’—’for life continuing on the earth, and for the earth continuing alive.’ Gratitude seems like an appropriate response to this short and heartfelt work, which further develops a vision of Americanness that eschews the familiar values of progress, mobility and power. Mr. Berry’s fictional world is flawed, hard and deeply cherishable.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“Berry makes the case of all who have told stories from the beginning of humankind—all our lives are stories, bound up in stories and passed on as stories . . . This book’s story is so real and well told that it enters the soul and spurs our own storytelling, which itself is the core of human community.” —Shmuel Klatzkin, The American Spectator

“Berry’s newest novel, Marce Catlett, is among his most aggressive fictional shots across modernity’s bow, a melancholy book that is angry but never vindictive, sorrowful but never bitter . . . Marce Catlett is Berry at his elegiac best, even as it hews more closely to his essays and Mad Farmer poems than to his most beloved novels. The novel has an argument, there’s no doubt, but in the voice of old Andy Catlett the story of that empty harvest weaves with the many stories found across Port Williams. And for as much as it simmers with an underlying fury, it’s a book that glistens with gratitude for what was and hope yet for the world to come.” —David Kern, WORLD

“Marce Catlett, Berry’s new Andy Catlett novel, brings this interplay of fiction and history to a new level. Though the novel ostensibly remains in Port William, it reads like a memoir, albeit one written in third person and cast in fictional form. As Berry lives into his tenth decade, he meditates on the way a simple story—one held in place and handed down from one generation to another—can shape our lives beyond all expectation . . . A story remembered in its place exerts a moral force. This is what Berry’s new novel shows us. But its inheritors must decide how they will respond to this force. As this novel narrates the history of this story’s life in this place, the Berry family myth takes on a public life and force, requiring its readers to decide how we will respond. May it inspire the local work that produces local benefits, but even more profoundly, may it inspire gratitude for the divine patience and forgiveness that scripts all our stories, even when they are marked by the loss of beloved goods.” —Jeffrey Bilbro, Plough

“Berry knows that he will not live into a time when America’s rural places are again prosperous reconciliations of art and nature. But he has given us stories whose memories, if acted on in our places, might bloom in new and unforeseeable reconciliations.” —Ethan Mannon, Front Porch Republic

“Now over 90 years old, Berry seems to have embedded in his latest novel, Marce Catlett, a kind of last word for his readers—a goodbye from Port William to us . . . [But] at the end of Marce Catlett, I realized this is not the end of Port William. All its stories still exist. There’s a reason Mr. Berry took us backward and forward in the timeline. He was teaching us how to love a people and a place, if only in our imagination, and those stories are still there.” —Russell Moore, Christianity Today

“His latest work Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story proves that he is still penning stories worth telling . . . Marce Catlett is not interested in individual responses to how rural life and agriculture have changed during the last century but in the importance of communally remembering a history on the verge of being wiped out. The novel uses remembrance as a point of comparison to fan our anger at how industrialization has flattened, monotonized and monetized the food we eat and the land and communities we are a part of. By highlighting the culture in agriculture and the beauty in knowing how to do a particular kind of work, Berry directs our attention to what we have lost.” —Amber Ruth Paulen, The Southern Review of Books

“Wendell Berry returns to his beloved Port William, offering a kind of benediction full of longing for a former life threaded with wonder at its beauty and its humble persistence.” —Sara Beth West, Shelf Awareness

“Vintage Berry, elegiac and elegant, with a profound sense of all that has been lost.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Wendell Berry 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 . . . Wendell Berry returns to his beloved Port William, offering a kind of benediction full of longing for a former life threaded with wonder at its beauty and its humble persistence.” —Shelf Awareness

“Berry explores the heritage of Andy Catlett, protagonist of his Port William stories and novels in this wistful tale of the steady decline of tobacco farming in America . . . In granular, Melville-esque depictions of the process by which tobacco was once cultivated, Berry crafts a paean to a distant way of life. The author’s fans will love this.” —Publishers Weekly