Jayber Crow

Rating:
Summary: The Ideal Reader's Ideal Read
Review: Zadie Smith wrote, "The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with."

That has been my experience over the past several days. I'm the sort who can always sleep, but since I started into Jayber Crow I've suffered a delicious insomnia whose symptoms include a reluctance physically to set down the book and turn off the light and an inability mentally to set aside the story or extinguish the lightning flashes it generates in my mind.

Usually what sets my mind whirring is incisive nonfiction (including Berry's). But Jayber Crow is definitely fiction. It contains some theses--economic, political, theological--and these are just what a reader of Wendell Berry's essays would expect to find in a novel bearing his name. But unlike lesser works of fiction, this one requires no caveat to the reader to "read past" the theses, to keep the themes from getting in the way of the story. That's simply not a danger here. The story is that good.

Here are all the pleasures of reading fiction: an unfamiliar world brought to life, or rather, the reader brought to life within it; characters so true that one cannot avoid plunging with them into sorrow and joy; the naming of experiences we all have had in terms that seem to have been made by the experiences themselves; and a dialect so authentic one couldn't fake it in years, but which one understands intimately as it rolls over the page.

The narrator's insights on life ring true because they seem to grow not from any predetermined agenda but from lived experience, from a life consumed by the love of people and place. More importantly, to read this novel is to breathe the air of a world that few Americans born after WWII ever knew but that many of us both yearn for and mourn in its loss and lack.

This novel has weaknesses, but they are few and forgiveable. Its technical mastery and its essential goodness goodness are incomparable--at least from the perspective of one "ideal reader."