Wendell Berry
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry is a meditation on aging. The story unfolds in the first-person voice of Hannah Coulter. Hannah, now in her late seventies, reflects on her life in a small farming community in Kentucky.
Growing up during the Great Depression, Hannah learns the survival skills of cooking, farming, and housekeeping from her grandmother. She marries her landlady’s nephew, Virgil, and is pregnant with their first child when he is called to serve overseas in World War II. Virgil is killed in the war and never sees his child. Hannah re-marries Nathan, a neighboring farmer. They have two sons and raise the three children in a healthy farming environment. Theirs is a happy marriage, spanning nearly five decades until Nathan’s death.
Now that her children have grown and gone their separate ways, Hannah evaluates her life. She paints an idyllic picture of farm life in the past, comparing it with the present. She sees the economic and social changes taking place all around her. She laments changes she sees in the natural environment and in the breakdown of community life in which farming families shared their joys and sorrows and were quick to help each other out in time of need. Most of the people she grew up with have died. The fabric of social life that sustained her and her neighbors has unravelled to make way for new, but not necessarily better, ways of living.
Hannah’s insights, as she looks back on her life, ring true for the most part. She tends to ramble, at times, and can come across as a bit preachy, which can add to the authenticity of her voice. The tone throughout is moving and pensive. The novel is a meditation on aging and an elegy on a way of life and the values it embodies that are slowly but surely fading into the distance.