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Summary
Summary
Sadness and loss invade nine-year-old Andy's world on a hot July afternoon when his Uncle Andrew is murdered. No one tells the boy why his uncle and namesake was killed, and the question follows Andy into manhood. This beautiful, bittersweet novel was featured by "Booklist" and "Library Journal" as one of the best books of 1996.
Author Notes
Wendell Berry The prolific poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry is a fifth-generation native of north central Kentucky. Berry taught at Stanford University; traveled to Italy and France on a Guggenheim Fellowship; and taught at New York University and the University of Kentucky, Lexington, before moving to Henry County.
Berry owns and operates Lanes Landing Farm, a small, hilly piece of property on the Kentucky River. He embraced full-time farming as a career, using horses and organic methods to tend the land. Harmony with nature in general, and the farming tradition in particular, is a central theme of Berry's diverse work.
As a poet, Berry gained popularity within the literary community. Collected Poems, 1957-1982, was particularly well-received. Novels and short stories set in Port William, a fictional town paralleling his real-life home town of Port Royal further established his literary reputation. The Memory of Old Jack, Berry's third novel, received Chicago's Friends of American Writers Award for 1975. Berry reached his broadest audience and attained his greatest popular acclaim through his essays. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture is a springboard for contemporary environmental concerns.
In his life as well as his art, Berry has advocated a responsible, contextual relationship with individuals in a local, agrarian economy.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The 1944 murder of the young protagonist's uncle accompanies him into adulthood. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Like The Great Gatsby, Berry's fifth novel is concerned with an extraordinary man's murder. Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway rehearses and combs the events that led to the killing, but Berry's Andy Catlett concentrates on the tragedy's effects on those who knew and loved the victim, especially his family. Andy is of that family; Andrew Catlett, shot on a summer day in the early 1940s when Andy was not quite 10, was his namesake. Now, 50 years later, Andy recalls what he did that day and since in reaction to Uncle Andrew's violent passing. He surveys everything he knew and learned about Uncle Andrew, who was the impulsive black sheep of his generation, and everything he saw and learned about the love his father and grandparents had for Uncle Andrew and their enduring grief after his death. Andy concludes with the greatest thing he learned: suddenly or gradually, the momentary material world and its people, no matter how cherished, pass away, yet we remain "in the company of the immortals with whom [we] have lived here day by day." Writing with his customary limpid grace, Berry transforms an elegy into a hope-filled hymn. (Reviewed Sept. 15, 1996)1887178228Ray Olson
Kirkus Review
By the prolific poet, novelist, and social critic (Watch With Me, 1994; Fidelity, 1992, etc.), an elegiac celebration of the end of innocence. Berry's fifth novel and ninth work of fiction is set, like most of his spare, exact work, in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. Andy Catlett, the narrator, looks back from the present at the moment when his idyllic childhood came to an end, in the summer of 1944, when he was nine years old. His beloved Uncle Andrew, a man who savored ``company, talk, some kind of to-do, something to laugh at'' above everything, is shot down, for unclear reasons, by the surly Carp Harmon. It is the first time that death has touched someone Andy knows, and despite the gentle support of his extended family (few contemporary writers dwell as much, or as movingly, on the complex nature of familial love), life suddenly seems less certain and right. Years later, a still troubled Andy attempts to discover why Carp Harmon (who served only two years in a state prison for the crime) killed his uncle. He seeks out his uncle's old friends in Port William, and out of their vigorous talk a portrait of a close-knit, resourceful, modest community emerges, but no easy answers. Memories are hazy, the possibilities raised disturbing but unprovable. What does emerge, though, is a portrait of Uncle Andrew as a robust but troubled man, trapped in a suffocating marriage, uneasy in his responsibilities. Berry deftly balances Andy's investigation into the town's past with an equally moving portrait of his growing realization not only of the sustaining value of memory but of the manner in which people are shaped in enduring ways by what they love. This is a modest, resonant work, both a sharp portrait of a small farming town nursing its secrets over several decades, and a penetrating celebration of the hold of family on the imagination.
Library Journal Review
Berry's (Another Turn of the Crank, LJ 10/15/95) fans will enjoy this new novel, again set in Port William, Kentucky. This time the poet/essayist/novelist turns his attention to nine-year-old Andy Catlett, whose world is turned upside down in 1944, when his beloved Uncle Andrew is murdered. Still haunted by the event years later, Andy researches the seldom-discussed details in an effort to understand Uncle Andrew's fate. In doing so, he learns a great deal about his uncle, his family, his neighbors, and life in the late 1940s. This gentle tale deals with big issues: grief, love, truth, and lossand their effects on a young mind trying to grow. For all libraries.Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, Md. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
