I have heard of Wendell Berry for a long time but I have only read a few of his essays and none of his poetry. I only recently leaned he also wrote novels when I asked a friend to recommend one of his books thinking his books were collections of essays. But my friend said his wife thought that it is in his novels that Mr. Berry most effectively presents his ideas, so he recommended Hannah Coulter. It is a good novel and I am glad I read it.

The narrator, after whom the book is entitled, is an old woman who tells the story of her life, including her two marriages and widowhoods. She lives in the fictitious Kentucky town of Port William. Indeed, in a sense, Port William itself is the central character since the book is concerned with the importance of place and rootedness in place, place thought of as not only the natural environment but as a community.

The book’s thesis, or so it seems to me, is that small, organic communities—especially farming communities—are most conducive to love and human flourishing. It very effectively depicts how farming, tending the land, can improve both the land and the people who tend it. In this it reminds me of a line from an old Zionist song, “We came to the land to build and to be built.” Hannah grows up on a rather poor farm and winds up living her life on a more prosperous one. It is a life devoted to family, friendship, and work.

The book’s portrayal of Port William is largely positive, and I am not sure it is not at least a bit romanticized. It is certainly not a small town like St. Mary Mead in Agatha Christie’s detective stories, a place where amateur sleuth Jane Marple has learned, though the intimacy of small town life, of the dark side of human nature . Still, in Hannah Coulter,the hardness of the work is not obscured nor is every character perfectly behaved. Yet it is also true that Mr. Berry’s focus is on the goodness of the community.

Port William, though, is a place that, since the end of the Second World War, has been in decline and this provides a recurring elegiac note. None of Hannah’s three children remain on the farm or in Port William. Two of them have marriages that end in divorce. The depiction of Hannah trying to understand this decline is well done. For the most part she is humble and admits to having only a partial understanding. Near the end her narration turns more didactic and I think this is an unfortunate lapse from the more ruminative tone of the novel as a whole. Still, even here, Hannah speaks in character and not as a mere mouthpiece for the author.

This novel is deeply felt . It is not like a Charles Dickens novel, full of colorful characters and dramatic episodes. The characters are realistic and it is not the events themselves that make the most impression but rather what Hannah and the others feel about the events. The book has a lot to say about family, small towns, farming, love, community, and forgiveness, and something as well to say about the forces that operate against at least some of these things.

Mr. Berry’s tale is about wholeness and human flourishing and the effort required and also about a kind of exile, even sometimes a kind of self-exile, from what he considers to be the most authentically human existence. In this (while recognizing that Hannah Coulter is concerned with localism and hardly at all–if at all–about a nation) I am again reminded of a piece of Zionist writing, this time from the great twentieth century Hebrew writer, Yosef Chaim. Brenner: “The Hebrew man who lives in a Hebrew village and engages in Hebrew work is not thereby released of all human suffering, but he is no longer in exile.”

Hannah Coulter is suffused with a hope for non-exile, for rootedness and love.