You read a book likeA Place on Earth by Wendell Berry, and you’re reminded of your own family and where you came from. Characters like Burley Coulter and Uncle Jack seem to be almost lifted wholesale from what I remember of many of the “characters” I knew as a child.
My father’s family lived mostly in the Shreveport, Louisiana, area, with a much larger group in Brookhaven, Mississippi (it was my grandfather who would wander away from Brookhaven and settle first in central Louisiana, in a town called Jena. He was working as a surveyor for a railroad company, and he lived in a boarding house operated by my great-grandmother and his eventual mother-in-law.
My father and his three sisters were all born in Jena but had moved to Shreveport by the late 1920s. Rubye was the oldest, followed by my Aunt Myrtle, my father, and my Aunt Ruth. There would have been an Aunt Elouise, born two years before my father, but she died the same year my father as born.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Photograph: My father and my Aunt Ruth about 1923.
It’s early 1945 in Port William, Kentucky. The war has been dragging on, but U.S. forces have survived the Battle of the Bulge. With a number of men involved in the fight in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, residents keep a close ear on the news.
Mat and Margaret Feltner receive a telegram. Their son Virgil is missing in action. That’s all that’s known. Virgil’s pregnant wife Hannah, who lives with the Feltners, gets the news at the same time. The not knowing is a kind of limbo state, and the family somehow has to come to terms with it. It will become even harder for Mat than it does for Hannah or Margaret.
The Feltner family is at the heart of A Place on Earth, the fifth of the Port William novels by Wendell Berry. First published in 1967 (with a new, edited version issued in 1983), the novel is in turn funny, tragic, moving, and exhilarating. It contains laugh-out-loud moments, and it has moments when you’re reaching for the tissues. It’s about family, fathers and sons, the land, community, and the people who are the community.
Wendell Berry as a young man
Berry has created some memorable characters. Uncle Jack Beechum had me laughing with his stories about funerals at the church. Burley Coulter is the steadfast friend. Ernest Finley, wounded in World War I, is the carpenter who gives his heart. Mat is a man of nobility and steadfastness who begins to crack. Ida and Gideon Crop experience and struggle to overcome great tragedy. As individual as they are, they’re recognizable. They are people you know; some are you own kinfolk.
The author also shows himself capable of throwing a curve ball when you least expect it. And once it’s thrown, you realize just how right it is and how well it fits into the story.
Berry is a poet, novelist, essayist, environmentalist, and social critic. His fiction, both novels and stories, are centered in the area he calls Port William, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. He’s won a rather astounding number of awards, prizes, fellowships, and recognitions. He lives on a farm in Kentucky.
A Place on Earth is a profound story, one that changes you when you read it. It’s also one worth reading over and over again.
Last Saturday, July 13, a man attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at the Butler County, Pennsylvania, county fair. Many – too many – newspapers didn’t report it the next day, not because they hate Trump but because they print Sunday newspapers early, and production was well underway. It’s a function of what’s happening in the newspaper business – early printing deadlines, pared down editorial and production staff, advertisers preferring other sources, declining newspaper readership, and more. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently announced it would no longer publish a print edition on holidays, supposedly to give its carriers the day off but really because it’s in retreat toward publishing online only for cost reasons. Rick Edmonds at the Poynter Institute has the story on the July 13 news, or lack thereof.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was the darling of the Western news media in the early 1970s, because he was resisting the Soviet regime and embarrassing to Richard Nixon as he pursued détente with Brezhnev and friends. And then the writer gave a speech at Harvard in 1978, and suddenly he’d become, in the news media’s eyes at least, a right-wing fundamentalist wacko. But as Gary Saul Morson writes in Commentary, Solzhenitsyn clearly saw what was coming with Western culture.
If I had to pick a favorite gospel, it would likely be the Gospel of John. It was the first book of the Bible I read after becoming a Christian. It’s also different from those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; for one thing, John skips the entire birth narrative of Jesus. (And my ESV Study Bible reminds me that not one of the gospels has a stated author; their associated names come from tradition and early church history.) Theologian Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder has a favorite gospel, too, and he explains why.
