They were just ordinary people living ordinary every day lives. Although they might not achieve greatness as the world sees it, they live a rich, full life, meaningful to themselves and the people around them. From the first Jayber resists other people’s suggestions that he “make something of himself.” Why should we try to make something of ourselves when we already are somebody?
Port William is a fictional town in Kentucky that Berry came back to several times. This book tells Port William’s story through the life of Jayber Crow, the bachelor barber, who says little, listens much and comes to know and love its people. Jayber, born in 1914, is orphaned at a young age and ends up in an orphanage away from Port William. Eventually he makes his way back in his early 20s. He and the town live through the Depression, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and into the 70s. Mostly a farming area, Port William goes through the changes the country does during all this time, and, like many rural small towns, suffers from modernization with children leaving for the big city, businesses folding for lack of anyone to carry on, schools closing to be consolidated with other towns, and mechanization taking over from the older ways of doing things. Still, people do their best to continue living their lives as best they can. People are born, grow up, marry, have children, watch the elders die, and eventually die themselves. But it’s what we do in between and how we treat other people that makes our lives meaningful.
It's a challenging book in that it makes one consider how they think about life and whether change, although inevitable, is always good. What is the good of war except to fill graveyards? How does life go steadily on when someone who meant so much to many people dies? How does one stop “progress?” And that’s what a good book does. It makes you think.
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