Wendell Berry is the author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For over forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky.
Emotionally troubled since a tractor accident severed his right hand, Andrew Catlett of Fort William, Ky., is a farmer turned agricultural journalist. In the course of a single day in 1976, the span of this elegiac novel, while in San Francisco attending a conference on agricultural technology, he wanders through pre-dawn streets reflecting on his life and his family's history. A long line of predecessors is warmly remembered: his parents and others whose love for the land has made of Fort William a world apart from urban anxiety and alienation. His disaffection with contemporary urban culture has been increased at the conference, ``a place of eternal hopelessness, where people were condemned to talk forever of what they could not feel or see.'' As he walks, dream-like sequences recall the early days of his marriage, the wisdom of those close to the land and, after an epiphany that brings him home, a healing takes place in ``the restored right hand of his joy.'' Berry, who lives and farms in Kentucky, writes with grace and eloquence of the beauty in handed-down lives. He previously evoked the fictional Fort William in Nathan Coulter , A Place on Earth and The Wild Birds. (Nov.)
Set in the year of the U.S. bicentennial, this novel is a lament for what the country has lost in its pursuit of progress. Andy Catlett, a farmer and agricultural journalist, has lost his land, and his resulting bitterness has cut him off from family and friends. After attending a pompous conference on ``The Future of the American Food System,'' he wanders the streets of San Francisco considering the spiritual dismemberment he sees around him. Because economic dictates have replaced principles of humanity, man's harmony with his environment has been destroyed. Andy's lyrical reveries allude to past generations of family and friends, but many of these characters are too sparsely drawn to capture the reader's interest. Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
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