Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself

Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself. By Wendell Berry. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000. 354 pp. $25.00 (cloth).

"I always tried to keep faith with my customers," says Jayber Crow, bar- ber, gravedigger and church custodian of Port William, Kentucky (p. 4). This is the record of a man who lives by keeping faith not only with his customers, but also with his secret, unrequited love for the much younger Mattie Chatham, and with his own tough-minded but gentle-hearted vision of life and of God's world. Most of all, he keeps faith with his native and then readopted community, and details its gradual death at the hands of a rapacious consumer economy and an increasingly exploitative relation to the land. This chronicle parallels his own movement from when "my life was all time and almost no memory" to when "it is almost entirely memory and very little time" (pp. 23-24). In the telling, Kentucky author, poet and essayist Wendell Berry keeps faith with the rich themes that have shaped his writings for years, primarily the power and vitality of real community, of life truly shared, and how it creates, defines, and sustains us. Returning incognito to the village of his birth, Jayber, through his own conscious choices and through events beyond his control, becomes both intimately tied to the community and condemned to reside always at its edges. Nevertheless, he writes, "I began to feel tugs from the outside. I felt my life branching and forking out into the known world.... I knew ... that nothing would ever be simple again" (p. 128).

Jayber writes of Port William that it "repaid watching. I was always on the lookout for what would be revealed. Sometimes nothing would be. But sometimes I beheld astonishing sights" (p. 5). He could easily have been speaking of this rich and moving chronicle of the trials and tribulations, and of the miracles of ordinary life, of a pilgrim's persistent probing into the mysteries of life and death, of the bonds of community and love, of the nature of God and of the incarnation and of how life, the ever flowing river of the generations, manages to get on. "This is a book about heaven," says Jayber (p. 342), "that sometimes threatened to become a book about hell" (p. 345). But his book is redeemed by the redemption of its author, a miracle worked by Jayber's achingly lonely vow to balance the infidelity of Mattie's husband, Troy, with his own unrelenting fidelity to her, and by his finally freeing himself, after Mattie's death, from his hatred for Troy and what he has done to Mattie and to the land she inherited. With that transformation, Jayber is able to see both himself and Troy as members of the gathered community, as part of the constantly moving and ever-changing river of humanity whose "only native tongue" is "that shout of limitless joy, love unbound at last" (p. 262).

PAUL F. CAMENISCH

DePaul University

Chicago, Illinois

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