Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story - (Port William) by Wendell Berry (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Andy Catlett tells the story of his grandfather and father's lives and how their stories, recalled by Andy to his own children and grandchildren, become "A Story Unending." Marce Catlett rises in the dark to go from his farm, by horseback and train, to Louisville for the sale of his tobacco crop at the auction house there. The price paid for each year's crop is being determined and destroyed by the power of a single buyer, James B. Duke. This year is especially grim since the price offered each grower is less than the expense of bringing the crop to market, and a year's worth of labor is lost. He returns to his family defeated and determined to discover some way to proceed. Many of his fellow farmers lack the resiliency and resourcefulness to continue, and the end for them is clearly visible. But with the help of other neighbors and growers, a way is discovered to protect the farmers and keep their rural families vital and in place"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

In the newest novel in the Port William series, Wendell Berry's beloved protagonist Andy Catlett tells the inspiring story of his grandfather Marce Catlett to his own children and grandchildren, and gives them a key to their place on the questionably settled land they all love

Andy Catlett's story begins as his grandfather Marce Catlett rises in the dark to travel from his farm by horseback and train to Louisville for the auction of his 1906 tobacco crop. The price paid for each year's crop has been depressed to virtually nothing by the power of a single buyer, James B. Duke. This year is especially grim since the price offered to each grower is less than the expense of bringing the crop to market. A year's labor is lost.

Marce returns to his family defeated, defiant, and determined to grow another crop. Many of his fellow farmers at first seem to lack the resiliency and resourcefulness to continue. Only with the cooperation of other growers can a way be found that protects these farmers and keeps their rural families vital and in place.

The power and depth of this story--and of the many stories within the history of the Port William Membership--resonate with love, kindness, and the held memory of family and community. In Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, celebrated author Wendell Berry brings to life a tale that devoted readers of the series will cherish. This moving novel is a testament to the goodwill that lives within the human heart and a stirring reminder that standing up for what we believe in is always a cause worth fighting for.

Review Quotes

"Marce Catlett, Berry's new Andy Catlett novel, brings this interplay of fiction and history to a new level. Though the novel ostensibly remains in Port William, it reads like a memoir, albeit one written in third person and cast in fictional form. As Berry lives into his tenth decade, he meditates on the way a simple story--one held in place and handed down from one generation to another--can shape our lives beyond all expectation . . . A story remembered in its place exerts a moral force. This is what Berry's new novel shows us. But its inheritors must decide how they will respond to this force. As this novel narrates the history of this story's life in this place, the Berry family myth takes on a public life and force, requiring its readers to decide how we will respond. May it inspire the local work that produces local benefits, but even more profoundly, may it inspire gratitude for the divine patience and forgiveness that scripts all our stories, even when they are marked by the loss of beloved goods." --Jeffrey Bilbro, Plough

"Berry knows that he will not live into a time when America's rural places are again prosperous reconciliations of art and nature. But he has given us stories whose memories, if acted on in our places, might bloom in new and unforeseeable reconciliations." --Ethan Mannon, Front Porch Republic

"Now over 90 years old, Berry seems to have embedded in his latest novel, Marce Catlett, a kind of last word for his readers--a goodbye from Port William to us . . . [But] at the end of Marce Catlett, I realized this is not the end of Port William. All its stories still exist. There's a reason Mr. Berry took us backward and forward in the timeline. He was teaching us how to love a people and a place, if only in our imagination, and those stories are still there." --Russell Moore, Christianity Today

"His latest work Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story proves that he is still penning stories worth telling . . . Marce Catlett is not interested in individual responses to how rural life and agriculture have changed during the last century but in the importance of communally remembering a history on the verge of being wiped out. The novel uses remembrance as a point of comparison to fan our anger at how industrialization has flattened, monotonized and monetized the food we eat and the land and communities we are a part of. By highlighting the culture in agriculture and the beauty in knowing how to do a particular kind of work, Berry directs our attention to what we have lost." --Amber Ruth Paulen, The Southern Review of Books

"Wendell Berry returns to his beloved Port William, offering a kind of benediction full of longing for a former life threaded with wonder at its beauty and its humble persistence." --Sara Beth West, Shelf Awareness

"Vintage Berry, elegiac and elegant, with a profound sense of all that has been lost." --Kirkus Reviews

"Wendell Berry has never hidden behind his stories; the land and people of Port William, Ky., have always been his land and his people. This truth is perhaps never more obvious than in Marce Catlett . . . Wendell Berry returns to his beloved Port William, offering a kind of benediction full of longing for a former life threaded with wonder at its beauty and its humble persistence." --Shelf Awareness

"Berry explores the heritage of Andy Catlett, protagonist of his Port William stories and novels in this wistful tale of the steady decline of tobacco farming in America . . . 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." --Publishers Weekly

About the Author

WENDELL BERRY, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, among other distinctions. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.