Customer Reviews

Jayber Crow

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought this book because I like everything that Berry writes, but I wasn't expecting anything too great. A story about a barber in Port William? Seemed a little strange to me, but because it was by Berry, it was worth a read. This book turned out to be a great surprise, true to Jayber Crow's observation that all of the good things in life have come as a surprise. This novel follows the thread of many of the stories we have read about the Port William membership. Many of the familiar characters are here. But it seems that all of the threads of Berry's many works are woven here into a fine and beautiful tapestry. Berry's major themes about stewardship, sense of place, the importance of caring relationships, sense of scale, etc, are all here in a great story of learning, love, and forgiveness. This is a book about much more than just Where. It is also a book about who, what, why, and especially how. Jayber Crow chronicles the changes that modernity and industrialism bring to small town America. Country people were trying to get away from "demanding circumstances." But they "couldn't quite see at the time, or didn't want to know, that it was the demanding circumstances that had kept us together." The changes that are chronicled here apply to urban life as well as rural life. Great neighborhoods and family/neighbor networks were also part of the life of the great pre-industrial cities. A very large part of the answer to modern decay is the restoration of rural life, but we cannot ignore the cities. The question for us is how to follow Jayber and "lay our claim" on a place, rural or urban, and make it "answerable to our lives." Right living, in all of the details laid out by Jayber, is a large part of the answer to modern problems. A barber turns out to be an ingenious stratagem for storytelling and the dispensing of Berry's distilled wisdom. And it is a most unusual and gratifying love story as well!

"Jayber Crow" is one of the most unusual and profound novels of this last century. On one level, it is a tale of the unfolding life of Jonah Crow, from his youth into his time of looking back upon the span of his life: it is the story of survival, bravery, acceptance. On this level, Jonah, who becomes Jayber, the barber of his beloved Port William, tells of the people of this town with great tenderness: their strengths and their foolishness (along with his own), and we come to know these townspeople and care for them.

Yet on another level, Jayber Crow is a philosophical reflection on the nature of love, God, time, and eternity. As a religious reflection, Wendell Berry, through Jayber, reaches to the core of our faith when he realizes that the only true prayer is "Thy will be done", a prayer that makes him tremble, but also makes him more of a whole person. Indeed, his reflections on the love of God, and the love that comes forth on this planet, is visionary and has the capacity to enlarge and fortify the heart of the reader. Chapter 23, "The Way of Love," is one of the greatest passages I have read. We see a man aching for love and for God, who some nights "in the midst of this loneliness" swings among "the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone." We feel for his struggle and his faith gives us faith.

Concurrent with his longing for God, and his faith, is his love for Mattie. It is the most beautiful and truest portrayl of love I have seen: it is a love that personifies First Corinthians 13. It is a love that wishes only good and finds hope in knowing it has loved: nothing more. It is a love that does not seek for a payback. Again in Chapter 23, Jayber reflects on a true love that breaks the barriers of time, reminiscent of jani johe webster's poem "loving" from "a spider on the wall": "when the skin / on this body / i now call mine / shall become bone / the very bone / shall cry unto your bone / i love you." So it is with Jayber, who writes, "That is why, in marrying one another, we mortals say 'till death.' We must take love to the limit of time, because time cannot limit it. A life cannot limit it. Maybe to have it in your heart all your life in this world, even while it fails here, is to succeed. Maybe that is enough."

Another meaningful comparison between Berry and webster is brought to mind after reading Berry's metaphor of the "the Man in the Well." What happens to a man who, alone for the day in the deep woods, falls into a well? Will he survive? Who is this man in our own lives, and into what wells have we or our loved ones fallen? In webster's prose poem "the weariest river," the narrator's grandmother is locked out of her farm house on a winter's night: again, will she survive, and how? Both metaphors speak to our existential situation, to isolation and to hope.

"Jayber Crow" probes the meaning of life and our relationship to ourseves, to one another, and to God. An amazing comparison is to "Mr. Smith" by Louis Bromfield: the tale of another man, also written in the first person, who struggles with the meaning of life, but with completely different results. Both men recognize the beauty of life and its suffering, and yet the course of each life goes in almost opposite directions.

The image Jayber gives of "the rooms" made by the woods, through sunlight and shadow, is an image that is also a talisman for readers who also seek peace in the midst of life.

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.

Quite simply the most important book I have ever read. The friend who first told me about this book calls it "The New New Testament." This book told me more about what human relationships are and what they should be than anything I have ever read. This is the first time that I have ever finished a book and immediately started to read it again. Since I finished it the second time, I have turned to it over and over for the wisdom, humor, sacredness that are all found in the simple, elegant way that Mr. Berry has with words. And I have shared it with the most important person in my life. I live in a small town and love the people who populate our communities. No one has ever captured the feel of these people and these places as Wendell Berry does. But more than that, Wendell Berry captures the essence of what we all are, the torment that arises between what we seem to know at our core are the real values of our lives and what we are pressed to pursue to our own detriment. The characters are constantly alive and this is the greatest love story ever written. Thank you Mr. Berry for making my life better by this wonderful book!

The deep observations of Jayber Crow should embarrass and shame readers of the modern age who share responsibility for what we've allowed to happen to our rural landscapes and communities. This is more than a great novel with memorable characters. It is wisdom and it should, like Berry's essays, wake us up to protect and value what remains of our land. It is clear just from reading this one novel that we are living in a world run by fools and, more than ever, we need to educate ourselves and our particular circle of influence to what is being lost. We need to guard our communities and change our lives to reflect our convictions. Most people won't realize what we've lost until its gone. Do more with your life than seek easy pleasure and comfort for yourself. Make a difference for the next generations. Oh, and maybe we should all be a little more wary of "the man behind the desk."

I've read most of Wendell Berry's works of fiction and many of his essays as well. Jayber Crow is another fine example of how Mr. Berry intertwines the themes of community, family (even though Jayber is an orphan and bachelor), love, duty, agriculture, technology, and religion. Initially, this wasn't one of my favorite Berry stories, but I've found that it has stayed with me since I finished it, and my appreciation for the Jayber Crow has grown as I continue to think about his life in Port William, a place I feel I know well, though don't belong to.

The utopian idealist Wendell Berry has blessed us again with a book that lambasts "progress" and whose main character lives a life most would deem too ordinary. But the limits of Jayber Crow's ambitions and his avoidance of authority give him the space to observe the human condition, and these observations hold the sincerity of the philosopher and the awe of the innocent. Berry is the master of the synechdoche: the microcosm represents the universal; the universal is in the details. I'm not quite sure how he does it. His use of the language is elegant, yet straightforward. His faith permeates every line. This is a craftsman writing at the top of his game. The reader may need some perseverance to reach the point at which Jayber Crow finds his destiny in Port William, but once he's in his chair, compromising with ego, and studying the community he loves, the reader will be hooked. By the time Jayber moves to his cabin in the woods, the reader will want to stay alongside him, to live deliberately and with Thoreau-like simplicity.

Jayber Crow was my first Wendell Berry book, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but what a great read this turned out to be! - and on so many levels. Berry paints beautiful word pictures throughout. His writing is unpretentious, yet wise: about friendship, love, loss - about life itself. At the same time, he's not afraid to use a remarkable regional variation of the word "touchy" from the Kentucky region, as on p. 57 he writes: "It was a touchous moment." It's easy to love that kind of thing in good books. And just about every reader can relate to Jayber's reflective soliloquy on the first page of Chapter 12, where on p. 133 Berry writes: "Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will." The whole of p. 133 in Jayber Crow may be one of the most beautifully written pages I have ever encountered, as Jayber would say, "so far." All the way through this terrific book, it was difficult for me to remember that it was a novel, not an autobiography - written by Wendell Berry, not Jayber Crow himself. One thing is sure: Wendell Berry knows how to tell a great story.

Zadie Smith wrote, "The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with."

That has been my experience over the past several days. I'm the sort who can always sleep, but since I started into Jayber Crow I've suffered a delicious insomnia whose symptoms include a reluctance physically to set down the book and turn off the light and an inability mentally to set aside the story or extinguish the lightning flashes it generates in my mind.

Usually what sets my mind whirring is incisive nonfiction (including Berry's). But Jayber Crow is definitely fiction. It contains some theses--economic, political, theological--and these are just what a reader of Wendell Berry's essays would expect to find in a novel bearing his name. But unlike lesser works of fiction, this one requires no caveat to the reader to "read past" the theses, to keep the themes from getting in the way of the story. That's simply not a danger here. The story is that good.

Here are all the pleasures of reading fiction: an unfamiliar world brought to life, or rather, the reader brought to life within it; characters so true that one cannot avoid plunging with them into sorrow and joy; the naming of experiences we all have had in terms that seem to have been made by the experiences themselves; and a dialect so authentic one couldn't fake it in years, but which one understands intimately as it rolls over the page.

The narrator's insights on life ring true because they seem to grow not from any predetermined agenda but from lived experience, from a life consumed by the love of people and place. More importantly, to read this novel is to breathe the air of a world that few Americans born after WWII ever knew but that many of us both yearn for and mourn in its loss and lack.

This novel has weaknesses, but they are few and forgiveable. Its technical mastery and its essential goodness goodness are incomparable--at least from the perspective of one "ideal reader."

I've heard it said that when one has something deep and profound to say, one says it in a story. It would seem that Wendell Berry acknowledges and takes advantage of this principle in Jayber Crow. Since I don't have time to tell a story here, I will simply say that Berry slowly and vividly paints a picture of his town, Port William, as a microcosm of community as it might exist anywhere, anytime, under many different circumstances. By the end, I was reevaluating some of my deepest presuppositions about "living." Henry David Thoreau would be proud, Mr. Berry.