How It Went

September 12, 2022
Berry (The Peace of Wild Things) offers more stories of Port William, Ky., and his frequent protagonist Andy Catlett in this expansive collection, tracing Port William’s transition from a relatively bucolic village in the 1930s to its present-day factory farms. “Time Out of Time” follows a young Andy as he spends an afternoon pursuing a squirrel through the branches of a giant tree—part of a forest that, the older Andy ruefully notes, will later be cut to the ground. “The Great Interruption” starts as a joke about a teenager in the 1930s falling out of a tree, thereby interrupting an illicit rendezvous, and then expands outward into a pensive consideration of the importance of storytelling in a community, and the impact of its loss. “Dismemberment” revolves around a more personal loss, when Andy, a 40-year-old farmer in 1974, loses his right hand to a harvesting machine and then, over the decades, comes to terms with the help of a close friend and others. Berry’s humanity and clear-eyed intelligence steer the stories away from simple nostalgia and into a thoughtful analysis of how communities inevitably change over time. This accomplished author still has much to offer.