A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership

I grew up in a New England farming community. I was not from a farm family myself, but I worked farms during my summers and came to know and love the people Wendel Berry gives life to in these stories.They were true human beings, and represent a way of life and an approach to living honestly and morally that has all but disappeared in today’s world. The truths to be learned from these people are incredibly important, and Berry presents these truths raw, and intense, and unalloyed.You will be a better person for having let these farmers into your life.

I think this is the place to start with Berry - a wonderful introduction. Some of the stories are simply beautiful. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. All are smart and deftly drawn. Move on from here to the novels, which are also excellent. "Jayber Crow" is, I think, one of the best novels I've read - perhaps one of the best by an American writer.

Wendell Berry is one of my favorite authors whether he is writing fiction, poetry or essays on environmental and farming issues. This book is short stories set in Port William. If you've read other books in the Port William series (Hannah Coulter, Jayber Crowe, Nathan Coulter, etc.) you will love this book. If you haven't read the series you should, everyone I know who has read them loved them. If you get a chance to hear Wendell Berry speak, take advantage, he doesn't do many public appearances, but he's a very interesting speaker.

If you’re at all familiar with Wendell Berry’s writing, you’ll know that a good number of his books are set in the same area, a small village of folks in Kentucky. This one takes up in that same area, but isn’t one story , or centering on mainly one person like some of his others do. This is more like a series of short stories that all melt into each other to fill in some gaps about lots of the people who may have been previously mentioned in other books.Berry is like a painter with this one, filling in some color in the small spots that need colored in, only his paintbrush used are his words. I’ve really enjoyed every one of his books , and they somehow remind me of my Grandma’s small area she was from in Southern Ohio. Everyone knew everyone else, there was a sense of community. If one person was happy, they all were, if one person was hurting , they all were. The land itself was a character in the story, as the scenery was a piece of the picture also.Wonderful writer if you like books about simpler times.

If you like Berry and his vision of community in an agrarian world, this book is just about perfect. By his own lights, the short story format allows him function following the form for which he expresses so much love, stories of lives told in bits and pieces, in humanely imperfect chronological order and sequence. The problem comes clear if you realize that Berry is human, that his love for the old agrarian ways makes him tell half truths about the economics of the question, and gloss over and transmute much toil and mindless suffering with claims about Joy in workmanship and in triumph over suffering. Eventually one gets annoyed with his blind denial that drought, flood, epidemic, and infant mortality, which the contemporary economic and scientific world has greatly mitigated, enoble those who endure them, while recession and depression and soil exhaustion are the real devils to be evaded. If one simply thinks about the variety of life made possible by current farming methods, the endless toil of his heroic farmers grows slightly stale. In that light Jayber Crow is Berry's greatest work, allowing him to rise to a spiritual level and dwell for a time on the higher matters of "peaceableness" where Mary Ann Robinson's Gilead abides. Then "A Place in Time" sinks to be seen for what it really is, a warm, cozy tale for practical city dwellers to hang our wistful, guilty nostalgia on while we go about our lives. City Life may not be all that we wish for, but the solution is not to be found in Berry's agrarian fairyland, but in the Lord of life with whom he plays, but to whom Berry will not overly submit. Berry's endless tale telling about old timey life with God and organized religion always held conveniently at bay most of all give the lie to his other wise pleasant stories.

I like short stories, I suppose because I have an attention span measured in nano seconds. This was a perfect book for me. I could read the stories in a single setting yet each of them made me think. When I consider the book as a whole I see a way of life that has been lost and shall never be reclaimed. I grieve for that.

Wendell Berry writes in a way that lets you see the lives of others, as they see their lives. I grew up with people like the ones he writes about. It is such a real representation of the hopes, dreams, failures, frustrations, realities, simpleness, imaginitiveness, and acceptance of the "the way it is" for so many people of the mid-south and lower Midwest. Their hearts are laid bare, their hopes revealed, their history preserved. Wendell Berry is like no other.

Its tough to offer an accolade about Wendel Berry not already said. His ongoing stories of the people of Port William lead and sustain us like a fine handcrafted walking stick or leather belt (a key missing prop in one very humorous story). Each word is carefully placed in a stone wall of literary greatness destined to last forever. And then there is the beauty of his writing, returning me to passages to read again, even three times. Berry makes me want to be a good writer and live a life grounded in family and friends.