Andy Catlett: Early Travels (Port William) [Paperback]

Wendell Berry (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2007 | Series: Port William

Andy Catlett is the latest installment in Wendell Berry’s Port William series, a distinct set of stories that Berry has been telling now for 50 years. Set during the Christmas of 1943, nine-year-old Andy Catlett sets off to visit his grandparents in Port William by bus, by himself for the first time. For Andy this is a rite of passage, his first step into manhood. His experiences on this solitary voyage become pivotal points in the entire Port William epic. The old ways are in retreat, modern life is crowding everything in its path, and as Andy looks back many years later, he hears the stories again of his neighbors and friends. A beautiful short novel, now in paperback, Andy Catlett is a perfect introduction to the whole world of Port William, and will be a rich new installment for those already familiar with this unfolding story.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Readers familiar with rural Kentucky novelist (A Place on Earth), poet (A Timbered Choir) and essayist (Another Turn of the Crank) Berry and his vast repertoire will feel right at home in this slim, memoirlike novel narrated by the elderly Andy Catlett. In the winter of 1943, at age nine, young Andy is allowed to set out alone by bus from his home in Hargrave to Port William, 10 miles away, where both his parents grew up. After coffee at the bus station (a nickel) and quick trip, he is retrieved by his grandfather Catlett's mule team, driven by longtime hired black servant, Dick Watson. Andy's observations of his grandmother's unfussy cooking and the men's work stripping tobacco in the barn is full of nostalgic, admiring detail. Dick and Andy visit Dick's wife, Aunt Sarah Jane, whose superstitions and acute perception of racial inequity "introduced the fester of it into the conscience of a small boy." At a visit to his mother's more modernized family farm, the absence of Uncle Virgil fighting overseas is grievously felt, and Andy is allowed to listen to the radio before sleeping. "The world I knew as a boy was flawed, surely," Berry writes wisely, "but it was substantial and authentic." (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From AudioFile

For fifty years, Wendell Berry has created stories of life in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky and shared them with readers. Although fictional, we recognize the characters . . .as real our own ancestors. This memoir-like tale gives us a view of that point in time when we slid from an agrarian to an industrialized society. After Christmas 1943, 9-year-old Andy Catlett makes his first solo visit to Port William. Paul Michael, as an elderly Andy, reflects on that memorable visit to his paternal grandparents, farmers, and his maternal ones, who lived in town. Speaking in a voice full of down-home wisdom, Michael creates an atmosphere in which we can imagine sitting in the company of our own grandpa, soaking up his history, which, by extension, is our own. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 12 and up
  
• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (November 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593761643
• ISBN-13: 978-1593761646
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #159,547 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tranquil and verdant in old age, January 19, 2007

By 

SK (Dayton OH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Andy Catlett: Early Travels (Port William) (Hardcover)

How many authors continue to get better as they get older? Berry does, because his work is built on solid foundations of spiritual and artistic discipline. He has never wasted his energy running after fashions, but rather has invested it in his family, his land, and his art. This book is therefore something quite rich, brimming full with clear-eyed insight into the human condition but even more importantly, with deep, sober, yet passionate love for humanity. As ever, the Port William microcosm shows a distinctly American possibility for life, and is tinged with an apprehension that this possibility is just about passed, with little to replace it. For all that, there is no despair here, but a living hope, whose only support is that that life is now on the page and can live in any reader. And you, dear reader, would be well-advised to open this book and join the Port William community.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "...a knot in the net that has gathered me up....", April 29, 2007

By 

K. M. "literary devotee" (California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Andy Catlett: Early Travels (Port William) (Hardcover)

Andy Catlett, title character, says this of one of his beloved elders, and means it about the entire ensemble of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, family hires, and others in his close-knit world of childhood, a world that also nurtured him into and through adulthood. Nine-year-old Andy's first solo trip the ten miles to Port William is cause for the boy to ponder how best to navigate the expectations, customs, and burdens of the loved ones he visits after Christmas in 1943. Andy, the boy, is joined in his ruminations by Andy, the man already a father many years and a grandfather too, who seasons his recollections of that rite of his youthful passage with the knowledge and wisdom come from time and the bittersweetness of recollecting kin and kith all gone.

The copyright page carries the disclaimer, "This book is a work of fiction. Nothing is in it that has not been imagined." But as other readers have written, one can also imagine fictional Andy and real Wendell slipping into each others skins with ease. Wendell Berry preserves a slice of World War II rural and very small town life with such loving care and meditative dignity that it is difficult not to think of the slim book as intensely personal.

ANDY CATLETT: EARLY TRAVELS is my first dip into the "Port William series." Thanks to the irresistible thumbnail sketches of so many characters who inhabit the other novels, I'll be dipping into more -- such as HANNAH COULTER and JAYBER CROW. Ironically, because this book serves more as an introduction to the slate of Port William denizens than as a fully rounded novel, it earns from me four and a half stars instead of five. But truthfully, ANDY CATLETT: EARLY TRAVELS is no less a treasure for the absence of high drama. Berry gently sucks at the succulent and nourishing marrow of American values and reminds us all of the truly important things in life. As Andy concludes, "And now, as often before, I am reminded how grateful I am to have been there, in that time, with these I have remembered."

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life Lessons, September 7, 2008

By 

R. Chaffey "beckahi" (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Andy Catlett: Early Travels (Port William) (Hardcover)

Wendell Berry has created something with the Port William Membership stories that perhaps no other writer has created. While other authors may return to the same character, no other author has crafted a series of tales and novels where the setting is more character than place. Reading the novels and stories of those who inhabit Port William and its environs is like returning home, like reliving your childhood and that of your ancestors, like seeing the world with brand new eyes.

In "Andy Catlett: Early Travels" Berry revisits a character readers familiar with his works have met later on in life. As an old man, Andy Catlett revisits the Christmas he was nine years old and was allowed to travel by himself to visit both sets of grandparents. To him it was the beginning of his manhood, a dividing time between his childhood and his future. He spends two days with his Catlett grandparents, witnesses their sparse economy and the simple life they lead among the encroachments of modernization. He also spends two days with his Feltner grandparents, more well-to-do farmers, but still exemplars of frugality and self-sufficiency. As an older man, he can look back on those few days and realize what he missed along the way and what he gained.

While slim and focused in scope, "Andy Catlett: Early Travels" reaches far and wide. Berry offers insights and observations into today's world without seeming to preach. His knowledge is assured and true and sad, in that through our modernization and our current way of life, we will not know how to provide for ourselves should our current system fail us. In times of economic crisis, these questions seem too obvious to ignore. And while Berry offers the condemnation that the present world may yet have to pay for what it has forsaken, he also offers reassurance and hope.