Rating: 
Summary: I bought it for $--but this novel is surely priceless
Review: I bought Berry's novel Jayber Crow in a sales bin for $--new, hardcovered and as fully intact as the wisdom within. Berry's nostalgia for what America once was is both lovely and yet realistically realized. There was no jumping into all too familiar pastoral ideal, but rather this novel is a treatise about sustainable life and land practices. For the introspective Christian reader, this novel is surely a rarety and a comfort. It is skeptical of common practices in modern religion and also searching for truths and hypocrisies while retaining loyalty and tenderness. For the non-religious or non-Christian reader that same introspection will surely be welcome. Berry is democratic, open, and above all, humanitarian. One finds the true meaning of care for others, for the environment, and for a "place" (the idea of the small town or community is lovingly rendered and displayed in terms of mortality and immortality. The idea of a barber who moonlights as town gravedigger/church custodian is a clever and enjoyable way to approach the small town of Port William's inhabitancy in its journey from cradle to grave.
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps Berry's Greatest
Review: I bought this book because I like everything that Berry writes, but I wasn't expecting anything too great. A story about a barber in Port William? Seemed a little strange to me, but because it was by Berry, it was worth a read. This book turned out to be a great surprise, true to Jayber Crow's observation that all of the good things in life have come as a surprise. This novel follows the thread of many of the stories we have read about the Port William membership. Many of the familiar characters are here. But it seems that all of the threads of Berry's many works are woven here into a fine and beautiful tapestry. Berry's major themes about stewardship, sense of place, the importance of caring relationships, sense of scale, etc, are all here in a great story of learning, love, and forgiveness. This is a book about much more than just Where. It is also a book about who, what, why, and especially how. Jayber Crow chronicles the changes that modernity and industrialism bring to small town America. Country people were trying to get away from "demanding circumstances." But they "couldn't quite see at the time, or didn't want to know, that is was the demanding circumstances that had kept us together." The changes that are chronicled here apply to urban life as well as rural life. Great neighborhoods and family/neighbor networks were also part of the life of the great pre-industrial cities. A very large part of the answer to modern decay is the restoration of rural life, but we cannot ignore the cities. The question for us is how to follow Jayber and "lay our claim" on a place, rural or urban, and make it "answerable to our lives." Right living, in all of the details laid out by Jayber, is a large part of the answer to modern problems. A barber turns out to be an ingenious stratagem for storytelling and the dispensing of Berry's distilled wisdom. And it is a most unusual and gratifying love story as well!
Rating:
Summary: After the 11th
Review: I had just finished Jaber Crow the 9th of September. I strongly recommend it for anyone dealing with the mental and emotional aftermath of the terrorist strikes. It is a lovely calm view of life---with strands of patience, kindness, understanding and the passage of time all wound together. The individuals in the story are all most bvelievable. It highlights the values of a small town. I live in a suburb of a major metropolitan area, but the values Berry speaks so movingly about are present in all societies---just differently.
Rating:
Summary: Wonders happen here.
Review: I have read Wendell Berry's nonfiction, but I am a newcomer to his fictional Port William community. Reading this book is like a visit to a simpler life in rural America. Set in 1986, this novel tells the life story of Jayber Crow (1914- ), orphan, doubting preministerial student, bachelor barber, grave digger, church janitor, and progressive pacifist. Although an ordinary man, Jayber is a truly memorable character who, from his later years, reflects upon his life with clarity and poetic insight. "I am a pilgrim," he says, "but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a staight line to me has been a circle or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order" (p. 133).This book is about many things, but should be read mostly for the sake of experiencing Berry's really fine writing. It is the story of Jayber's unrequitted love for a married woman, Mattie Chatham. It is a fictional memoir about faith, loss, farming, and finding one's place in the world. "I will have to share the fate of this place," Jayber writes about his declining community. "Whatever happens to Port William happens to me" (p. 143). It is also about bearing witness to dying farms and small businesses. Jayber's memoir is filled with page after page of profound insights. For instance, about growing old and loss he writes: "I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cost. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of the loss) found everything, and is ready to go" (p. 353). Examining marriage, Jayber says: "I saw too how a marriage, in bringing two people into each other's presence, must include loneliness and error. I imagined a moment when husband and wife realize that their marriage included their faults, that they do not perfect each other, and that in making their marriage they also fail it and must carry to the grave things they cannot give away (pp. 193-4). About the pace of modern life, he observes: "The people are in an emergency to relax. They come for the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. Their eyes are hungry for the scenes of nature. They go very fast in their boats. They stir the river like a spoon in a cup of coffee. They play their radios loud enough to hear above their motors. The look neither left nor right. They can't slow down" (p. 331). Although somber in tone, Jayber's story reveals that wonders do happen in life. Jayber learns we live our lives with questions, the answers to which must be lived out "perhaps a little at at time" (p. 54), or which may take longer than a lifetime for us to find. "This is a book about Heaven," Jayber explains. "I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see through the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like a reflection of the trees on the water" (p. 351). This book is Berry at his best, and one of the best novels I've read this year. G. Merritt
Rating:
Summary: Jayber Crow - A personal review
Review: I just finished reading Jayber Crow, a novel by Wendell Berry. It relates the sojourn of a Kentucky boy, orphaned early; raised by his uncle and aunt to age of 10. Orphaned again by their death, he ends up in a real orphanage. His next stop is a provincial theological seminary where he stays until he finally decides that the stories of the bible are not real. Leaving the seminary he makes his way to Lexington where he finds employment as a stable boy at the trotting track and takes classes in English literature at the University without mingling with other students, taking examinations or otherwise becoming part of the University. His employment status improves as he finds work as a barber using skills he had picked up during his long stay at the orphanage. This is his life until loneliness drives him to place his few belongings in a cardboard box, stuff his savings in his shoes and jacket lining and set off for Port William, the hamlet that held the graves and memories of his childhood.
At some point in his growing up, Jaber had gotten the idea that he had the latent ability of "make something of him self and amount to something."
He ends up as the bachelor barber of Port Williams where most of the male community sooner or later drift into his shop on a more or less regular basis, "...men such as Uncle Isham Quail and Old Jack Beechum and, later, Athey Keith and Mat Feltner, intelligent men who knew things that were surprisingly interesting to me. They were remembers, carrying in their living thoughts all the history that such places as Port Williams ever have. I listened to them with all my ears..."
Jaber Crow does more than just listen. He develops a deep affection for them and an abiding linkage with Port Williams:
"I came to feel tenderness for them all. T his was something new to me. It gave me a curious pleasure to touch them, to help them in and out of the chair, to shave their weather-toughen old faces. They had known hard use, nearly all of them. You could tell it by the way they held themselves and moved. Most of all you could tell it by their hands, which were shaped by wear and often by the twists and swellings of arthritis. They had used their hands forgetfully, as hooks and pliers and hammers, and in every kind of weather. The backs of their hands showed a network of little scars where they had been cut, nicked, thornstuck, pinched, punctured, scraped and burned. Their faces showed that they had suffered things they did not talk about." But Jaber Crow found more than just interesting faces in Port William. He found himself and he found his community...his place. He had carried with him his loneliness, his isolations, and his self-reliance for a long, long time. " I learned to think of myself as myself. The past was gone. I was unattached. I could put my whole life in a smallish cardboard box and carry it in my hand."
But when he got back to Port Williams and recognized some of the folks he knew and who knew him "...well, that changed me. After all those years of keeping myself aloof and alone, I began to feel tugs from the outside. I felt my life branching and forking out into the known world. ...nothing would ever be simple for me again. I never would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away."
Jayber's place in his community, his role there, his thoughts, his unattained love, and his relationship with the fields, streams and forests of the place provoke an inescapable reflection on what it means to "amount to something, to make something of oneself."
Rating:
Summary: Jayber Crow - A personal review
Review: I just finished reading Jayber Crow, a novel by Wendell Berry. It relates the sojourn of a Kentucky boy, orphaned early; raised by his uncle and aunt to age of 10. Orphaned again by their death, he ends up in a real orphanage. His next stop is a provincial theological seminary where he stays until he finally decides that the stories of the bible are not real. Leaving the seminary he makes his way to Lexington where he finds employment as a stable boy at the trotting track and takes classes in English literature at the University without mingling with other students, taking examinations or otherwise becoming part of the University. His employment status improves as he finds work as a barber using skills he had picked up during his long stay at the orphanage. This is his life until loneliness drives him to place his few belongings in a cardboard box, stuff his savings in his shoes and jacket lining and set off for Port William, the hamlet that held the graves and memories of his childhood.
At some point in his growing up, Jaber had gotten the idea that he had the latent ability of "make something of him self and amount to something."
He ends up as the bachelor barber of Port Williams where most of the male community sooner or later drift into his shop on a more or less regular basis, "...men such as Uncle Isham Quail and Old Jack Beechum and, later, Athey Keith and Mat Feltner, intelligent men who knew things that were surprisingly interesting to me. They were remembers, carrying in their living thoughts all the history that such places as Port Williams ever have. I listened to them with all my ears..."
Jaber Crow does more than just listen. He develops a deep affection for them and an abiding linkage with Port Williams:
"I came to feel tenderness for them all. T his was something new to me. It gave me a curious pleasure to touch them, to help them in and out of the chair, to shave their weather-toughen old faces. They had known hard use, nearly all of them. You could tell it by the way they held themselves and moved. Most of all you could tell it by their hands, which were shaped by wear and often by the twists and swellings of arthritis. They had used their hands forgetfully, as hooks and pliers and hammers, and in every kind of weather. The backs of their hands showed a network of little scars where they had been cut, nicked, thornstuck, pinched, punctured, scraped and burned. Their faces showed that they had suffered things they did not talk about." But Jaber Crow found more than just interesting faces in Port William. He found himself and he found his community...his place. He had carried with him his loneliness, his isolations, and his self-reliance for a long, long time. " I learned to think of myself as myself. The past was gone. I was unattached. I could put my whole life in a smallish cardboard box and carry it in my hand."
But when he got back to Port Williams and recognized some of the folks he knew and who knew him "...well, that changed me. After all those years of keeping myself aloof and alone, I began to feel tugs from the outside. I felt my life branching and forking out into the known world. ...nothing would ever be simple for me again. I never would be able to put my life in a box and carry it away."
Jayber's place in his community, his role there, his thoughts, his unattained love, and his relationship with the fields, streams and forests of the place provoke an inescapable reflection on what it means to "amount to something, to make something of oneself."
Rating: 
Summary: Metaphor, Kentucky Style
Review: I was skeptical when I started reading Wendell Berry's "Jayber Crow". A Christmas gift from my sister, it was outside the realm of my normal sci-fi and fantasy, so I didn't give it much hope. I'm writing to admit that I am a changed man. Wendell Berry's look at the life and times of the barber of Port William from the 1920's to the 1970s was entrancing and breathtaking. The work was a wonderful metaphor of the world as we know it, questioning the concept of "advancement", and wrapping us in both the pleasures and trials of a simpler time. I was particularly taken with the final image of this book (which it appears Berry has a penchant for making powerful), and its implications for both the characters and the metaphor.
Rating:
Summary: Metaphor, Kentucky Style
Review: I was skeptical when I started reading Wendell Berry's "Jayber Crow". A Christmas gift from my sister, it was outside the realm of my normal sci-fi and fantasy, so I didn't give it much hope. I'm writing to admit that I am a changed man. Wendell Berry's look at the life and times of the barber of Port William from the 1920's to the 1970s was entrancing and breathtaking. The work was a wonderful metaphor of the world as we know it, questioning the concept of "advancement", and wrapping us in both the pleasures and trials of a simpler time. I was particularly taken with the final image of this book (which it appears Berry has a penchant for making powerful), and its implications for both the characters and the metaphor.
Rating:
Summary: There's nothing like a good story
Review: I've heard it said that when one has something deep and profound to say, one says it in a story. It would seem that Wendell Berry acknowledges and takes advantage of this principle in Jayber Crow. Since I don't have time to tell a story here, I will simply say that Berry slowly and vividly paints a picture of his town, Port William, as a microcosm of community as it might exist anywhere, anytime, under many different circumstances. By the end, I was reevaluating some of my deepest presuppositions about "living." Henry David Thoreau would be proud, Mr. Berry.
Rating:
Summary: Belonging to a place
Review: I've read most of Wendell Berry's works of fiction and many of his essays as well. Jayber Crow is another fine example of how Mr. Berry intertwines the themes of community, family (even though Jayber is an orphan and bachelor), love, duty, agriculture, technology, and religion. Initially, this wasn't one of my favorite Berry stories, but I've found that it has stayed with me since I finished it, and my appreciation for the Jayber Crow has grown as I continue to think about his life in Port William, a place I feel I know well, though don't belong to.
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