A Place in Time

These stories went straight to my heart.

I’ve been a Berry-reader since the mid-nineties and have read everything he’s written, but not since my first reading experience (The Memory of Old Jack) have I been so deeply moved by something he’s written. A Place in Time offers twenty short stories about the people and events of Port William, the fictional community in Kentucky that Berry has been developing imaginatively since Nathan Coulter in 1960.

Like Old Jack, much of this book is preoccupied with aging and mortality. Characters we’ve grown to love are getting old, and we are given a tender account of what’s on their minds, and how they view their lives, as they approach death. Their lives are full of richness, and also heartache. In one story, we meet young Tom Coulter before he goes off to war. In another, Burley Coulter remembers various people and eras — including the events of Nathan Coulter, and the loss of Tom in the war, as seen from his perspective. In another, we see Big Ellis courting Annie May Cordle, a vision of him in his youth that’s followed a few stories later by a glimpse of him on his deathbed.

The cumulative effect of working through these stories is to place us within the remembering mind of someone who has loved, and belonged to, the Port William membership. The structure of the book is psychologically realistic, because our minds and memories work associationally. As we read this collection, we encounter Burley Coulter alive and exuberant in one story, yet in another, he’s dead and buried as Art Rowanberry points out his burial place to Andy Catlett. In one story Elton Penn is young and strong and compelling; in another, he’s unexpectedly gone, leaving a house full of mourners and a neatly hung work jacket on the barn wall. The sequence isn’t chronological but associational, and probably thematic.

Several stories made me cry. Probably the most tender, to me, is “The Requirement,” in which Burley visits a failing Big Ellis. A few made me laugh out loud as well, such as “The Early Education of Andy Catlett.” I read this one aloud to my family in the car. I had read it online a few years ago, but it struck me as funny now as it did then, and my family loved it too.

As in previous works, I feel that Andy Catlett is the narrative center of this collection — the perspective in which Berry most invests himself. Andy (like Berry) is a member of my parents’ generation, and that too made these stories very meaningful for me. I felt like I recognized some of the themes and preoccupations of a soul in the rapidly changing world, themes I am beginning to develop myself in my thoughts, and which are more advanced in my parents: the search for coherence in one’s life; the growing awareness of mortality, and of suffering; the immeasurable value of dependable friendships; character, and exemplary lives; memory. The didactic voice was more subdued in these stories than in some previous works, in which the main concern has seemed to be to make an argument about culture and agriculture. Yet the values Berry has been setting before us for 50 years now shine from these pages in characters whose lives exemplify the quiet heroism of long perseverance and care for the world.