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Wendell Berry, the agrarian novelist and poet, has long played with the line between fiction and autobiography. In the collection of essays and stories The Art of Loading Brush (2017), for instance, Berry included two stories that explicitly blended his fictional world of Port William with Port Royal, the Kentucky town in which the past several generations of Berry’s family have lived and farmed. In the short story “The Order of Loving Care” in particular, Andy Catlett, Berry’s fictional counterpart, meets several of Berry’s real friends. Marce Catlett (2025), Berry’s new Andy Catlett novel, brings this interplay of fiction and history to a new level. Though the novel ostensibly remains in Port William, it reads like a memoir, albeit one written in third person and cast in fictional form. As Berry lives into his tenth decade, he meditates on the way a simple story – one held in place and handed down from one generation to another – can shape our lives beyond all expectation.
Wendell Berry’s new novel blurs the line between fiction and autobiography more than ever before.
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