Content area
Full Text
FIDELITY: FIVE STORIES, by Wendell Berry. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. viii. + 201 pages. $20.
Wendell Berry's new collection of stories invites a series of recognitions, beginning with what should now be the familiar faces and places of his fictive northern Kentucky world near the confluence of the Kentucky and the Ohio Rivers. In some stories readers may discern literary forebears, for these accounts of lives of rural sufficiency bear their learning lightly but perceptibly: a young wife's ability in "A Jonquil for Mary Penn" to rescue her husband from "the dark and mostly silent angers that often settled upon him and estranged him from everything" faintly recalls the Pervins of D. H. Lawrence's "The Blind Man"; "Making It Home," first published in The Sewanee Review as "Homecoming," is an Odyssean tale of humanity restored after the disorder of war, after "having been a creature no taller than a sheep or pig"; and a son's efforts to preserve for his father the dignity of death in the first half of "Fidelity" nicely counterpoints Nick Adams's meticulous recreation of order in a postwar world. In one story readers may even suspect a glancing sketch of the author in the blacksmith Elder Johnson, who "was the best within many miles" not only in his chosen craft but also as "one of the keepers...