Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story

Berry explores the heritage of Andy Catlett, protagonist of his Port William stories and novels (including Jayber Crow), in this wistful tale of the steady decline of tobacco farming in America. In 1906, when Andy’s paternal grandfather, Marce, travels to Louisville to sell his crop, he winds up taking a loss. Marce’s son, Wheeler, who goes on to become a lawyer, remembers how his father’s despondency moved him to help create the Burley Tobacco Growers Co-operative Association, which sought to guarantee fair prices for farmers. From there, the narrative snakes between Wheeler being pulled back to Port William after a stint working for a congressman in Washington, D.C., and his son Andy’s reminiscences of his youth laboring as a hired hand on local tobacco farms. Andy looks back with fondness on the days before automation, when people like Marce tended crops by hand: “He had loved profoundly his grandpa’s way of farming, when people and animals had collaborated in ways long known and now gone.” In granular, Melville-esque depictions of the process by which tobacco was once cultivated, Berry crafts a paean to a distant way of life. The author’s fans will love this. (Oct.)