Customer Reviews

Jayber Crow: A Novel

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

While this book certainly has its strong points, on the whole the book is just too long at times with its endless trivial details of the lives of the people of Port William. Perhaps if you grew up in that era, in that kind of town, you might enjoy a nostalgic look back at those simpler times, but otherwise the book comes off as a marathon session of Mayberry RFD.

As a long-time fan of Berry's poetry and essays, I decided it was time to turn to his prose. And I shouldn't have been surprised to find that it was a mingling of those two - a beautifully poetic prose tinged with the instructiveness of an essay. Wendell Berry has proven himself a master storyteller and his tales are always compelling.

"Jayber Crow" tells the life story of Jonah Crow, a barber in the Port William Membership, who affectionately becomes known as Jayber. The novel builds slowly, dwelling on Jayber's youth and his misguided attempts to serve God through the ministry. Disillusioned with too many doubts and questions with no answers in sight, Jayber sets off on his own and eventually discovers his talent for cutting hair. He finds himself the barber of Port William for over thirty years, faithfully cutting hair and participating in the lives of those around him.

Initially, Jayber may seem like a lonely man. He is a confirmed bachelor, who lives in his small apartment above the barber shop. Yet he knows the deepest, fullest extent of love and passion, as yet unrequited by Mattie Keith (Chatham). (As he says, "I was married to Mattie Chatham, but she was not married to me...) He watches Mattie as she herself experiences love, marriage, loss and misery, never once able to express his true feelings for her. Even after he retires as barber, Jayber still remains the town's barber, and becomes an owner of property - a small cottage by the river where he can fish and reflect on the glories of nature. By and by, Jayber comes to find the answers to those doubts and questions he had long ago concerning God and he proves himself to be a faithful servant and steward of God's creation.

Wendell Berry creates a wonderful cast of characters whom he evokes with believability and wisdom. The town of Port William Membership becomes a real place on the Kentucky River, that watches as the land around it becomes more technological and industrial. Yet Berry maintains his focus on how this industrial progress can be just as destructive as others might deem it necessary. Berry shows this distinction in the story of the Keith family - the struggle between father and son-in-law - for the future of the family farm.

Berry's telling of Jayber's life is poetic and often elegiac. As he gives up his barber shop, the reader feels like they are saying goodbye to Jayber as well. We have lived with him through the peaks and valleys, and felt the sting of his unrequited love for Mattie. As industrial progress closes in on Port William, we feel the decrepitude and downfall of the small "backwater" town. We grieve for Jayber's losses; but Berry is not one to let the story die without a hopeful conclusion. His final paragraphs, to me, rank among some of the best conclusions in literature.

I just finished reading Jayber Crow, a novel by Wendell Berry. It relates the sojourn of a Kentucky boy, orphaned early; raised by his uncle and aunt to age of 10. Orphaned again by their death, he ends up in a real orphanage. His next stop is a provincial theological seminary where he stays until he finally decides that the stories of the bible are not real. Leaving the seminary he makes his way to Lexington where he finds employment as a stable boy at the trotting track and takes classes in English literature at the University without mingling with other students, taking examinations or otherwise becoming part of the University. His employment status improves as he finds work as a barber using skills he had picked up during his long stay at the orphanage. This is his life until loneliness drives him to place his few belongings in a cardboard box, stuff his savings in his shoes and jacket lining and set off for Port William, the hamlet that held the graves and memories of his childhood.
At some point in his growing up, Jaber had gotten the idea that he had the latent ability of "make something of him self and amount to something."
He ends up as the bachelor barber of Port Williams where most of the male community sooner or later drift into his shop on a more or less regular basis, "...men such as Uncle Isham Quail and Old Jack Beechum and, later, Athey Keith and Mat Feltner, intelligent men who knew things that were surprisingly interesting to me. They were remembers, carrying in their living thoughts all the history that such places as Port Williams ever have. I listened to them with all my ears..."

Jaber Crow does more than just listen. He develops a deep affection for them and an abiding linkage with Port Williams:
"I came to feel tenderness for them all. T his was something new to me. It gave me a curious pleasure to touch them, to help them in and out of the chair, to shave their weather-toughen old faces. They had known hard use, nearly all of them. You could tell it by the way they held themselves and moved. Most of all you could tell it by their hands, which were shaped by wear and often by the twists and swellings of arthritis. They had used their hands forgetfully, as hooks and pliers and hammers, and in every kind of weather. The backs of their hands showed a network of little scars where they had been cut, nicked, thornstuck, pinched, punctured, scraped and burned. Their faces showed that they had suffered things they did not talk about."

But Jaber Crow found more than just interesting faces in Port William. He found himself and he found his community...his place. He had carried with him his loneliness, his isolations, and his self-reliance for a long, long time. " I learned to think of myself as myself. The past was gone. I was unattached. I could put my whole life in a smallish cardboard box and carry it in my hand."
But when he got back to Port Williams and recognized some of the folks he knew and who knew him "...well, that changed me. After all those years of keeping myself aloof and alone, I began to feel tugs from the outside. I felt my life branching and forking out into the known world. ...nothing would ever be simple for me again. I never would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away."
Jayber's place in his community, his role there, his thoughts, his unattained love, and his relationship with the fields, streams and forests of the place provoke an inescapable reflection on what it means to "amount to something, to make something of oneself."

A magnificent exploration of love and peace. It changed the way I look at my family and my life. If only I were half so wise as Jayber Crow...

I bought Berry's novel Jayber Crow in a sales bin for $--new, hardcovered and as fully intact as the wisdom within. Berry's nostalgia for what America once was is both lovely and yet realistically realized. There was no jumping into all too familiar pastoral ideal, but rather this novel is a treatise about sustainable life and land practices. For the introspective Christian reader, this novel is surely a rarety and a comfort. It is skeptical of common practices in modern religion and also searching for truths and hypocrisies while retaining loyalty and tenderness. For the non-religious or non-Christian reader that same introspection will surely be welcome. Berry is democratic, open, and above all, humanitarian. One finds the true meaning of care for others, for the environment, and for a "place" (the idea of the small town or community is lovingly rendered and displayed in terms of mortality and immortality. The idea of a barber who moonlights as town gravedigger/church custodian is a clever and enjoyable way to approach the small town of Port William's inhabitancy in its journey from cradle to grave.

In his preface to "Jayber Crow," Wendell Berry admonishes reviewers against finding either a "text" or "subtext" in his beautifully crafted novel. Berry then warns reviewers who "explain, interpret...or analyze" his work will face exile on a "desert island in the company only of other explainers." Faced with these restrictions and prohibitions, this reviewer will lavish praise on the author's sense of place, his gorgeous use of language and his admirable celebration of the American character.

Borrowing thematically from Mark Twain's "Huckelberry Finn," "Jayber Crow" is a twentieth-century version of an American everyman's journey of understanding and self-acceptance. Twice orphaned Jayber Crow never makes much money, never owns his own home, never marries. Yet this gentle self-made spiritual giant who savors his life while trimming men's hair truly loves his Kentucky home of Port William. Crow is a living embodiment of a Jeffersonian sensibility towards land; the protagonist extols the linkage between a respectful, near-reverential stewardship of the natural world and a sense of human fulfillment and grace. Berry's Kentucky is not a cliched Arcadia. Nature is often unpredicatable and tormenting. What redeems and renews the relationship between humans and land is respect, modesty and connectedness, three qualities Jayber Crow exemplifies his entire life.

It is not an accident that the man Crow admires more than any other, Athey Keith, epitomizes man's symbiotic, custodial relationship with the living earth. Nor is it accidental that the person who most tries Jayber's belief in the human condition, Troy Chatham, represents not only human cupidity, but alienation from and exploitation of the natural world.

Berry's physical descriptions of water, earth, plants, animals and climate are sensual delights, lushly detailed and enormously evocative. Place mingles with the idea of home; the physical absorbs the spiritual; the specific event gains universal significance. Because Berry imposes a modesty on Jayber Crow, readers discern a profound compassion for human frailties and a renewed faith in the imperative of connection. The novel is at its best when Berry reveals our common needs and drives for attachment: to our spiritual essence, to our brothers and sisters, and to our fragile, forgiving planet.

Echoing Serwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio," Berry's novel also selects a common man to serve as the unspoken but ackowledged subliminal repository of a town's secrets and identity. Jayber Crow, unassuming barber, shares and shapes the identity of Port William, either through his ministrations to men's hair, as gravedigger or as church sweeper. Regardless, the people of his community reveal themselves to him, and Crow perceives them as eminently human, flawed, incomplete and wonderful. The author's ability to represent the masaic of our national character through the people who form the boundaries of Jayber Crow's life is simply extraordinary. Nowhere is Berry's hopes for our national survival better manifested than through his depiction of Mattie Athey Chatham. Under the author's skilled handling, Mattie evolves far past a love interest into a symbol of redemption and reconciliation.

Wendell Berry holds an esteemed position as an interpreter of who we are, what we believe and what we hope to represent. "Jayber Crow" cements Berry's reputation as a celebrant of our democracy.

I was skeptical when I started reading Wendell Berry's "Jayber Crow". A Christmas gift from my sister, it was outside the realm of my normal sci-fi and fantasy, so I didn't give it much hope.

I'm writing to admit that I am a changed man. Wendell Berry's look at the life and times of the barber of Port William from the 1920's to the 1970s was entrancing and breathtaking. The work was a wonderful metaphor of the world as we know it, questioning the concept of "advancement", and wrapping us in both the pleasures and trials of a simpler time.

I was particularly taken with the final image of this book (which it appears Berry has a penchant for making powerful), and its implications for both the characters and the metaphor.

Maybe I should a lyrical piece of poetry because Berry is more of a poet than a novelist -- this is one of the most beautifully written novels I've come across. Every page seems to have a passage worthy of underlining and coming back to. Other have summarized well the fictional life of the narrator, Jayber, who takes on a mental and spiritual journey through his childhood, adventures and later life with such gorgeous prose that you won't be able to put it down. In the beginning the author warns that we shouldn't try to deconstruct or interpret the book as that would ruin it. With such lovely prose and elegiac style, I'd hate to give anything else away except to urge anyone who loves a coming of age story and great writing to rush out and buy it. This is the first Berry book I've read, but it was highly recommended to me by a very strong reader friend and as usual, she was right on the mark! The last page had such an aching quality that most readers will find themselves reading it over and over, sad that such a fine book as come to a close.

a wonderful story of every-person's pilgrimage - of deliberate and not so deliberate choices along the path. beautiful words and images. a true challenge to walk on, and to consider that walking on may not be walking away in an age of mobility. thank you Mr. Berry.

I agree with the reviewers who ranked the book a 5. While it contains several themes, it is first and foremost a spiritual book to me. It's beautiful prose captures the essence of friendship, the virtues of small-town America, the calm and terror of the river, the fragility of the land, and the tug of war between Heaven and Hell. It also details one of the most unusual love stories I have ever read. I have read it twice and am beginning it for a third time. I often go to sleep and wake up thinking about it and its meanings.