Book Review: “Marce Catlett”

In his latest novel, Wendell Berry, 91, again invites the reader into the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. Renowned as an essayist and poet, Berry, through a trove of eight novels and dozens of short stories, captures the history, pride, and heartache of this small, rural community spanning time from the Civil War to the present. 

“Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story” begins in 1906. Farmer Marcellus — Marce for short — and a neighbor set out at midnight on a hopeful yet apprehensive journey to Louisville. Traveling first on horseback, then train, and finally by foot, the pair eventually stands beside their hogsheads of tobacco that have traveled ahead of them from their small farms to the auction warehouse. A single bidder representing the American Tobacco Company buys the entire crop for a few pennies per pound, only enough to pay the farmers for the cost of sending it to market and the commission on its sale. “Its purchase, properly named, was theft,” writes Berry. 

This short novel, peppered with essay-like interludes, weaves together three generations of Catlett men — Marce, his son Wheeler, and his grandson Andy. It is from the perspective of Andy, an autobiographical stand-in for Berry, who is now an old man, that the story unfolds. In part lyrical lament, part celebratory remembrance of his family’s history, Andy reckons with the profound outside influences, mainly that of the post-World War II industrialization of agriculture, that have transformed Port William’s unique regional culture and economy. The town has changed from a patchwork of self-sufficient homesteads making their livelihoods from tobacco and other crops to one in which, Berry writes, “the traditional subsistence economies of households and neighborhoods were supplanted by the global economy of extraction, consumption, and waste.”

Neither Wheeler, who becomes a lawyer (as did Berry’s own father), nor Andy can make a living farming full-time, although they’ve been shaped and schooled by Marce’s dogged determination to make a living from the land. The reasons for this failure lie beyond the fact, Berry acknowledges, that tobacco is found to cause cancer, and include “the technical romance of the corporate giants, the millionaires and billionaires, who would conquer the earth, conquer ‘space,’ invade Mars, a place better known to them than the country that grows their food.” 

Through one brilliantly constructed sentence after another, Berry again captures a place in time that has existed nowhere else and will likely never exist again: stories about tobacco-stripping rooms; dug cellars where the cream was brought to settle; Marce quizzing his grandson about what makes a solid mule team; and neighbors united by a shared history and occupation. A sense of loss pervades the book despite its melodic celebration of a family’s deep connections to their little place on Earth. Berry writes that the three men — Marce, Wheeler, and Andy — were made brothers by their failure: “their discovery that the vision, as each one of them in his own time has seen it, could not live beyond them, so hard upon them has been the force of the changing times.”

– Sonja Heyck-Merlin

This review was originally published in the spring 2026 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener.