Wendell Berry's "Jayber Crow"

Last night the Fab 5 met to choose our books for the next six months, a meeting that is always filled with anticipation. And very difficult decision-making. Four people brought 36 books. Yikes. We pored over them, and in the end were rewarded with a list of 6 books we are very excited to read.

But now I go back to our last meeting, when we discussed Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. The reason I did not write about it at the time is that I had not finished it yet. So we had two discussions about it, last month and this month.

Jayber Crow is about an “ineligible bachelor barber” making his way through life. Orphaned at an early age, Jayber (born Jonah, hint hint) first considers ministry, then finds his way back to his birthplace to settle in and live his life alone, but not always lonely.

I’m probably one of the last to come to the Wendell Berry party. And I am knocked out by his characterization, his description, and his compassion for every character in the book. It took some patience and some deliberateness to make my way through it, but I was rewarded.

This book is about Jayber, first and foremost, a man you come to love. It is also about small towns, generational differences, the change in farming from small homesteads to big agriculture, and the beauty of nature that we both treasure and destroy.

It is also a novel layered with religious imagery, from floods to rainbows, from death to resurrection, from rebirth to sacrificial love, from hell to heaven. And you can’t help but draw the parallel between Jayber Crow and Jesus Christ.

[Spoiler alert]

Jayber, though by no means a perfect man, lives a solitary life, surrounded mostly by men, and is “reborn” to a cold, lonely earth when he flees his old life by pushing himself through a tiny bathroom window at a dance hall. He makes a personal commitment to a woman who has given herself to someone else, and vows to treasure her and love her in the way that he can, from a distance. In their later years, he walks with her, just enjoying her company, through a beautiful wooded area.

The final scene brings the two together as the wooded area is being logged. It brought to mind one of my favorite Over the Rhine songs, “The Trumpet Child.” “The trumpet child will lift a glass / his bride now leaning in at last / his final aim to fill with joy / the earth that man all but destroyed.” That image of joyful union amidst the ruins of sin has always given me goosebumps, and I loved seeing a new iteration of it in Jayber Crow.

Now, having said all that I just did, I should point out that Berry starts off the novel with a warning against finding subtexts, explanations and interpretations, stating that people who do what I have just done should be “exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers.” Would that really be so bad???

Friday Noon Movie Club: "The Artist"

This week’s Friday Noon Movie Club pick was The Artist. Now, I knew things were a little different this time around, because instead of walking into a theater populated mainly by middle-aged men attending stag (which, though I am middle-aged myself, and each time I go I might find myself attending stag, still creeps me out), the theater held 3 or 4 couples, of decidedly older ages. Seemed like sort of a sweet beginning!


And then I was joined by 4 friends. We started off the afternoon by admiring the multitude of rocks on the left ring finger of one lucky lady (and no, he didn’t go to Jared). Going to be an exciting summer!

We watched a very random assortment of previews--several of which I've seen approximately 25 times now. I have to say, I'm very curious about Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Maybe it's just Ewan McGregor. I'll be belting out songs from Moulin Rouge any moment now.

Okay, the first thing you need to know if you are going to see The Artist in a theater: a silent movie may not be the best place to eat popcorn. The Artist is a black and white silent movie. While there is music, just as in the old silent films, it’s not blasted through the stereo system in the same way to which we are accustomed, at least not at our showing. Crunching popcorn suddenly takes on a new resonance. One friend must have left the theater with an almost full bag of popcorn, because I don’t think she ate more than a handful during the movie.

It’s also not a great place to have your cell phone go off unexpectedly, as happened to the lady on my right. In fact, it’s not a great place to whisper about the movie or talk at all. On the other hand, there’s no need for anyone to whisper loudly, “What’d he say?” because he didn’t say anything.

I’m a word person, so it kills me to not know what the character is saying. I found myself tensing up at times, just waiting for some words to appear on the screen to let me know what the heck they were saying! But after a while, it becomes the norm, and you develop a new patience with the story.

Now on to the movie. On the surface, The Artist is a throwback to the old days, using the old methods of showing story and character without actually hearing the actors speak. George Valentin is a silent film star loved by legions of fans. We get to know George and his life through lots of exaggerated facial expressions, shadows, reflections, newspaper headlines (Who’s That Girl? is plastered across the paper that his distant wife is holding in front of her face), and other hints. George meets an aspiring actress, Peppy, who charms him, and everyone else. George is himself entertaining and charming, but he is also a proud man.

His pride makes it very difficult to deal with the sudden change that movies with sound bring to the industry. He struggles to keep his career moving forward, losing much through things he can and can’t control. Meanwhile, Peppy is moving up in the ranks, a rising star in the new “talkie” medium. You can’t miss the wonderfully filmed scene where the fading George meets Peppy on a staircase—George is going down, while Peppy is going up. People are moving quickly around them, all looking like they are going places. George doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

It’s a tribute, I think, to Jean Dujardin, who played George, that I liked his character as much as I did, in spite of his pride and self-absorption. Peppy lives up to her name, as played by Berenice Bejo, a lively young woman with an incredible smile.

This movie is partly about the transition from silent films to talking pictures, and it is partly a romance. It is also an exploration of the way we find our own identity, often falling into the trap of believing what is reflected in the eyes of others or believing our own press.

Another aspect of the story is our consumption of celebrity, putting one person high on a pedestal, then letting them tumble when something new comes along. We have witnessed this over and over in show business, and it’s even true for the high school football star who never quite makes it in college. Chris Smit, a professor at Calvin College, has written a book about this called The Exile of Britney Spears. He focuses in particular on the public’s consumption of young female stars, making Britney Spears his case study.

So there is more to this movie than meets the eye. But even what meets the eye is a movie that is sweet, funny, and has both charm and depth. And a really cute Jack Russell terrier.

**Odd sidenote—as I wrote this, Jean Dujardin showed up in an Artist skit on "Saturday Night Live"! Still pretty charming.

Brian Selznick's "Wonderstruck"

The Invention of Hugo Cabret was already a favorite in our family, and the movie Hugo cemented my fanship. So we were pretty excited to get started on Brian Selznick’s latest illustrated novel, Wonderstruck.

Wonderstruck takes the interaction between great story and wonderful illustration that was the joy of Hugo Cabret to a new level. Rather than illustrating the story that he is telling, in Wonderstruck Selznick writes one story with words and writes another with the illustrations that are interspersed in the pages of words. In the words, a young boy in the 1970s has lost his mother and is searching for information on his father. In the illustrations, a young, deaf girl in the 1920s runs away from home.

The two stories, separated by time and place, eventually become intertwined in surprising and satisfying ways. Lots of twists and turns in the story kept us eager for the next pages. Selznick proves that his creativity has not reached its limit, and I’m excited to see what he does next!

I read this one aloud to my 8 year old. She was breathless each chapter, wondering when she would get to revisit the illustrated storyline; she could hardly stand to put the book down each night. There were a few moments, as Ben searches for clues about the father he never knew, that made me wonder if this book would be the prompting of an explanation of the birds and the bees to my daughter. That did not come to pass, mostly because she didn’t want to stop reading to ask questions.

There are sensitive portrayals of the challenges of being deaf. And Selznick is clearly fascinated by museums and collections. In the endnotes, he mentions that credit is due to the book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg, which is a book I remember from my childhood with great affection. He also mentioned that there are many tributes to that book placed throughout Wonderstruck. So what else was there to do but pull out Frankweiler and read that one aloud next? We are about three chapters in.