I wrote this review essay last year in the hopes of placing it in the Literary Review of Canada but was told that its length and a backlog of Canadian books made it ineligible. At the time of this abrupt change of direction, he was living and teaching in New York City, having earlier been a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University and then lived in Italy and France on a Guggenheim fellowship.
The rules Stegner had in mind, among others, hold that estrangement is a more engrossing theme than belonging, the city a more vivid scene than the countryside, leisure a more interesting subject than work, and evil a richer topic than good.
Berry has reversed all these rules. His subject in his novels and stories, and in many poems and essays as well, has been the goodness of a vanished way of living and working in a tiny region of rural Kentucky. He has written of the extraordinary range of competencies that this way of life fostered, and of its arduous but unhurried pace in which there was still time for talk and for the flowering of individual characters.
Now, in his 88th year, Wendell Berry has produced what seems to me a crowning glory โ a page book called The Need to Be Whole in which he pleads with his divided compatriots for peace, understanding and mutual forgiveness. No one could be better placed than Berry to issue such a plea. On the other, he has consistently spoken up for that rural America which is now the great reservoir of support for Donald Trump, and deplored the contempt in which its people are held by many of his erstwhile allies in peace, civil rights and environmental causes.
More particularly, he thinks that the proper relationship between the general and the particular has been lost. One of the particulars that Berry thinks is being fatally lost is historical memory, and a substantial section of his book is devoted to the Civil War and its aftermath. Again Berry is well placed. In effect, Kentucky was at war with itself and bears the scars of that internal division to this day, Berry says.
