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???