JAYBER CROW: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself, by Wendell Berry. Counterpoint, 363 pp., $25.
By Emily Gordon
A BALDING bachelor, who hears everything from behind his barber’s chair, is the eyes and ears of a tiny southern town just before the din of modernity. Wait: A pensive, restless orphan hears God’s call — or thinks he does — but after asking too many unanswerable questions at the seminary, embarks on a journey toward a very different set of callings. Or how’s this? A passionate man shakes with hatred for his rival, who’s married to the woman whose love he would die for and who is systematically wrecking the land that sustains them. Also: A gardener lives in a two-room cabin by the river, collecting the pieces of things that drift by after storms and composing small rhymes, and takes his pleasure in lone walks through the unspoiled woods.
All of these — and many, many more — are the life stories of Jayber Crow, contained in Wendell Berry’s magnificent new novel of the same name. The first thing that Jayber, the narrator (born Jonah, reduced to plain “J.” by the orphanage superintendent, nicknamed “Mister Cray,” then “Jayber,” by his barbershop patrons) shows us is how much we miss by making any assumptions about rural life. “Jayber Crow” continues Berry’s series of novels set in the fictional town of Port William, Ky., which “would be smaller than the dot that locates it” on a highway map, needs no police and barely has a store; residents sit and talk without rushing, and farm the land cultivated by their great-great-grandfathers. They say of a brawl, “He drawed back and hit that big ‘un right in the googler, and he went over like a plank. That put the quietus on him.”
It sounds easy; it sounds quaint and corny and not altogether true. Yet it’s none of those things. The people in “Jayber Crow” are from small-town Kentucky, all right, and they have a battery of idioms that put the quietus on the whole English language — but only because they’re so perfectly apropos. In fact, nothing is as simple as it might seem, because the same people who pass along the comical news that “they cut a rock out of old Mrs. Shoals’ apparatix as big as a hen egg” are suffering through life with unbendable eloquence.
There is much to endure in Port William. A woman loses her small daughter, festooned with flowers, to a truck in the road and lies down on the fresh gravesite, beyond consolation. A couple grows old letting bitterness and disappointment take over their marriage until nothing else is left. An aging, brilliant farmer relinquishes control of his property to his machine-mad, arrogant son-in-law and spends his last years watching the land he knows as well as himself become spoiled and financially imperiled by the modern greed for instant gratification. Boys go to Vietnam and come back to be buried. Television, the interstate highway, the Lexington stores pull people away from the town and each other.
But Jayber Crow, perhaps, suffers the most keenly. He spends his days cutting hair and acting as a sort of bartender/priest/counselor to Port William’s male population (women only come into the barbershop to bring their young sons), and, as a secondary profession, digging graves. The two occupations are strangely, intimately related; Jayber marks the passage of time by inches of hair and feet of earth. And he has a knowledge of his neighbors that few others share. As he reflects, “I have raked my comb over scalps that were dirty both above and beneath. I have lowered the ears of good men and bad, smart and stupid, young and old, kind and mean; of men who have killed other men (think of that) and of men who have been killed (think of that).”
At night, Jayber aches for Mattie Chatham, who pinned down his devotion in a moment on an ordinary day when he saw her playing with a group of children: “I was all of a sudden overcome with love for her. It was the strongest moment I had known, violent in its suddenness and completeness, and yet also the quietest. I had been utterly changed, and had not stirred…. I felt her come into being within me, as in the morning of the world.” Maggie is married, and Jayber will not tell her what he feels. This love story is all the more poignant for its complete absence of courtship and romance. This is the kind of true love that scrapes at the heart and never goes away.
There’s something old-fashioned about Berry’s narrative, as constant, languorous and winding as the book’s ever-present Kentucky River; I kept expecting the chapters to begin “In which our hero…,” as if it were Dickens or Henry Fielding. There’s something Dickensian, too, about Jayber’s progress as a young man through a sometimes dark and always colorfully populated world-or, in its most serious moments, like the spiritual ordeals of Stephen Dedalus or Jude Fawley. Berry is a justly celebrated poet, which is reflected in his prose: dense without being overrich, stunning in its philosophical clarity, and sparkling with well-chosen particulars and the language of a region that delights in words.
By the end of “Jayber Crow,” you’ll feel you spent your life in Port William, too. When you leave it, you’ll feel its absence, and the lonely barber’s, like a missing friend.
Published October 15, 2000

BOOKS IN BRIEF: FICTION & POETRY
By Emily Gordon
MAILMAN
By J. Robert Lennon.
Norton, $24.95.
You probably don’t know your mail carrier, but he or she knows you. In J. Robert Lennon’s fourth novel, we meet 57-year-old Albert Lippincott—a k a Mailman—and it is clear that he is intimately familiar with everyone on his route: he knows their handwriting, their habits, their skin magazines and in many cases the contents of their letters. Albert, a former physics student and onetime mental patient, has a penchant for opening people’s mail and learning, for instance, of the impending suicide of a young painter. Albert lives in the New York college town of Nestor, one of Lennon’s many ingenious references to Homer’s “Odyssey.” Albert’s travels take him not just around his district but to a Peace Corps stint in Kazakhstan, to New York City (home of his dramatic older sister, Gillian) and to suburban Florida, where his parents live and whose beaches end up being a kind of Ithaca for Albert at the novel’s dreamy, decidedly unworkaday end. Yet Albert is no classical hero; his are the Pyrrhic battles against bureaucracy, the limitations of the imagination, the self-betraying body and the difficulties in finding love. Lennon’s Brodkeyesque sensual memory, his artful wordplay and the many startlingly hilarious moments of sweetness—respites from Albert’s often bleak adventures— make Lennon’s novel both intricate and mesmerizing.
Sunday, September 15, 2002
HEADLINE: BOOKS IN BRIEF: FICTION; Dances With Hens
BYLINE: By Emily Gordon
In the Irish writer Sebastian Barry’s new novel ANNIE DUNNE (Viking, $24.95), human beings remain a mystery to each other even when they share a life, a home, even a bed. It is the late 1950’s, and Annie Dunne and Sarah Cullen are cousins in their 60’s who work a small farm together in County Wicklow.
Neither has ever married—Annie has a hump on her back and never had suitors—and the two have forged a symbiotic bond in their mutual need for survival. The farm demands their attention from daybreak to dusk, and they don’t see much of other people—until one summer when Annie’s great-niece and great-nephew come to stay while their parents look for work in London. The children delight Annie, filling her with youthful energy. They confound her, too; they play strange games that aren’t altogether innocent, and their impulsiveness disrupts Annie and Sarah’s spartan routine. Further disruption comes in the form of Billy Kerr, a local laborer who comes to call on Sarah too often for Annie’s taste. Billy is a dark and complex character, but Barry’s real triumph is Annie, who lives a quiet life set to “the small music of the hens” but inside churns and rages like a waterfall. “Annie Dunne” suspends rural Ireland in a time when women still make their own butter and cars are only just becoming common. Barry is also a playwright, and his dialogue is clear and musical. But it’s Annie’s passionate observations and shifting moods—rendered in dense prose that’s close to poetry—that fuel this fine novel.
GRAPHIC: Drawing (Judith Wilde)
May 26, 2002 Sunday
HEADLINE: BOOKS IN BRIEF: FICTION & POETRY
Postcoital Aesthete
BYLINE: By Emily Gordon
Darius Halloway, an urbane professor of French literature at a Toronto college, knows he’s struck gold in Emma Carpenter, his young, unpredictable and sexually ravenous lover. She’s as much trouble as she is a joy, but when she finally leaves him, he’s stunned: what can matter now that Emma’s gone? The Canadian writer David Gilmour’s new novel, SPARROW NIGHTS (Counterpoint, $24), is a chronicle of erotic obsession after the fact, a grown-up version of Scott Spencer’s “Endless Love.”
We barely know Emma herself; she appears in flashback vignettes, potty-mouthed and inscrutable. It’s Darius’s rampaging mind that really interests Gilmour, who creates a professor simultaneously prim and outrageous. Without Emma, his nerves are raw, and everything starts to bother him: the incessant flapping of a German flag raised by his next-door neighbor, another’s barking dogs, a noisy air conditioner in a Caribbean hotel. He lectures, chats with students and goes out to dinner (on what seems to be a remarkably lavish academic salary), but inside he’s roiling with pain. It’s not long before he acts on his annoyances, as well as his pent-up desire: he begins to frequent seedy massage parlors, whose employees become part of his life in ways therapeutic and—at the book’s end—sinister. Gilmour’s prose has flashes of bright metaphor, and his dialogue is alert and alive. Darius is a believable aesthete—he’s consumed with status, the impression he’s making and the gnawing power of the past.
GRAPHIC: Drawing (Helen Grohmann)
Sunday, September 14, 2003

From the July 24, 2005 Newsday:
Talking with Kate White and Sam Baker: Cosmo editors turned mystery writers
99 ways to kill your boss
BY EMILY GORDON
Emily Gordon is a writer in Brooklyn.
July 24, 2005
If Kate White, the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, is ever murdered, the current intern won’t be a suspect. Not only is the undergrad loving her summer at the fabled women’s magazine, she’s also devoured all of her boss’ books – four mysteries to date, including the newest, “Over Her Dead Body” (Warner, $24.95). Meanwhile, White plans for a private chat with the intern about her own writing projects. The Prada-wearing devil with the miserable staff is nowhere to be found – except in the book. In White’s serenely cheerful new novel, the editor of a celebrity rag is bludgeoned at her desk, and it’s the assignment of a plucky freelancer named Bailey Weggins to figure out whodunit.
You might think researching and writing books is a lot for White to add to running a magazine, managing a staff and soothing riled stars (Donald Trump, Julia Stiles and Kate Hudson are some good-natured exceptions). But that wouldn’t be thinking like a Fun Fearless Female. Just across the Atlantic, another Cosmo boss is making it look simple: Sam Baker, editor of the magazine’s British edition, also has just published her first book, “Fashion Victim” (Ballantine, $21.95). In “Body,” it’s a ghastly entertainment-magazine editor who bites the dust; in “Victim,” it’s a New York designer. It’s up to Baker’s heroine, Annie Anderson, the new hire at a top fashion magazine, to lock up the case.
A reporter trained in hard news, Annie is more Hildy Johnson than Anna Wintour wannabe. Baker says fondly of her heroine, “I like that she’s not perfect. Apparently she swears a lot! … I wanted my characters to have real issues and real demons.” On her quest for the designer’s killer, Annie faces nasty crooks, a runway show in a chilly river and a very grouchy boss. Baker, who’d planned to leave the industry altogether, had just finished “Victim” when she got a call about the Cosmo job; “It was a weird kind of kismet,” she says. As is the chance that both editors would publish mysteries simultaneously, which they didn’t plan.
Back in New York, White reigns benignly over the same small, brightly decorated office where she once interviewed the legendary Helen Gurley Brown years ago for another magazine (coincidentally, they were wearing the same outfit). White, a veritable Forrest Gump of the magazine world, has worked for nearly every women’s and family magazine you can name and hired writers like Mary Gordon and Jay McInerney. Eventually she landed what she calls “the most fun job in the world.” Still, she says, “I think I have an outsider soul” – much like Bailey, whom White has put in a host of familiar but potentially deadly environments, from the wedding industry (“Till Death Do Us Part”), to the spa world (“A Body to Die For”), to, in this and her first novel, her own magazine-world turf.
As a result, White’s readers get an excellent introductory course in magazine journalism – not to mention forensic theory, advanced lip-gloss technique and trenchant satire of the “bliss vs. buzz” and “pictures are the new words” debates White and Baker know so well. Similarly, in “Fashion Victim,” there are high-fashion tidbits galore, from the seat-assignment class system at runway shows to the pernicious knockoff trade. Baker marvels, “One of the things that I find so clever about the fashion industry is that everyone thinks it’s a lot of fluffy airheads, and meanwhile it’s a $250-billion industry! Nobody takes them seriously, meanwhile, they make a — [EG: i.e., shitload] of money!”
Baker (whose forthcoming second book bears the snappy title “This Year’s Model”) says gleefully of writing fiction, “During the day I spend the whole day taking unnecessary words out, and at night I put them all back in.” She adores Carol O’Connell (“brilliant”) and Jacqueline Susann’s camp classic “Valley of the Dolls”; White, who’s lately been reading Greek plays and poetry criticism, picks her favorite as Ruth Rendell (“She never cheats.”).
Though she’s added another great haughty-queen boss to the literature, Baker herself tries for gentleness: “I learned quite early on from one of my first bosses that you can get people to do things for you without fear – because they like you and want to please you,” she says. White, whose Mona the Murdered Boss is no Strawberry Shortcake, agrees. She speculates that many notorious terrors are probably overstressed. And, she adds, “we’ve seen what happens to people like that – when it explodes on them, no one pities them at all. … At the same time, at the front end, people don’t know how to say, ‘Look, you gotta stop doing that.'” The Cosmo staff has one of White’s bosses from her teenage years to thank for their congenial workplace. “I was 16 years old, and I remember storming out one night from the office … and thinking: I will never be that kind of boss!”
Baker, who in college was an avid reader of the magazine, remembers that “Cosmo said that even if you weren’t born into having anything great, you could still have it. You can be that thing you want to be. If someone had said to me when I was 18, ‘In 18 years you’ll be editing Cosmo,’ I’d have laughed.”

When White was 17, her mother gave her a copy of Helen Gurley Brown’s saucy how-to “Sex and the Single Girl” with these instructions: “Don’t follow any of the tips in this book, but be like her.”
Typically Cosmo, both women are having a fabulous time exceeding all expectations.