Publishers Weekly
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Berry explores the heritage of Andy Catlett, protagonist of his Port William stories and novels (including Jayber Crow), in this wistful tale of the steady decline of tobacco farming in America. In 1906, when Andy’s paternal grandfather, Marce, travels to Louisville to sell his crop, he winds up taking a loss. Marce’s son, Wheeler, who goes on to become a lawyer, remembers how his father’s despondency moved him to help create the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, which sought to guarantee fair prices for farmers. From there, the narrative snakes between Wheeler being pulled back to Port William after a stint working for a congressman in Washington, D.C., and his son Andy’s reminiscences of his youth laboring as a hired hand on local tobacco farms. Andy looks back with fondness on the days before automation, when people like Marce tended crops by hand: “He had loved profoundly his grandpa’s way of farming, when people and animals had collaborated in ways long known and now gone.” 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. (Oct.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Kentucky farmer and writer Berry continues his cycle of Port William stories. Marcellus Catlett, 43 years old, is a tobacco farmer, noble and stoic, out in the fields before dawn. It’s 1906, and he’s hauled in a fine crop, “prizing at last the cured and graded, appraised and cherished leaves into hogsheads that he sent by the railroad to the auction warehouse in Louisville.” Alas for Marce, James B. Duke’s American Tobacco Co. has cornered the market and is paying less than it costs to grow the stuff. “Its purchase, properly named, was theft,” writes Berry. It’s up to Marce’s young son, Wheeler, grown to manhood, to enlist the aid of the government to organize a farmers cooperative to wrest a fair price for their crop. Berry, as always, writes in simple but elegant language, celebrating rural lifeways: “Wheeler grew into the love of farming. He loved the days he worked to the end of, and from there looked back at the difference he had made.” Wheeler, like Marce, is also a born leader, brilliant and diligent, qualities that pass along to his descendants all the way up to the present day, when, Berry allows, tobacco isn’t much farmed anymore, given its carcinogenic qualities. Berry’s novel is very much of a piece with his celebrated essays on culture and agriculture, almost to the point of didacticism; what saves the book from becoming an extended sermon (“The industrial replacement of neighborhood by competition and technology moves everything worthy of love out of reach”) is Berry’s ability to construct a good story that circles through time, beginning and ending in the faraway past and showing plainly the habits of mind and work that have been undone by corporate rule, divorce from nature, and simple greed, “a mortal disease.” Vintage Berry, elegiac and elegant, with a profound sense of all that has been lost. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.