Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story
By Wendell Berry
Counterpoint, 176 pages
Published October 7, 2025
In Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, we return once more to Wendell Berry’s fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, known well to devoted readers of Berry’s longstanding series. In 1906, farmer Marce Catlett travels to sell his tobacco harvest and is met at the auction by the American Tobacco Company, a sole, monopolistic buyer. Marce’s profits that day barely cover the cost of transporting the harvest to auction, and he returns home with little more than a sizable appetite.
What follows is a sweep of vignettes that show how Marce’s story of being “robbed of his crop and his work” is passed down to future generations — his son, Wheeler, and his grandson, Andy. At its core, this is a story about a story. Through it, readers familiar with Berry will appreciate his recurring themes of membership to the community and the land. Wheeler becomes a lawyer and champions the Burley Tobacco Co-operative Association, which fights for fair prices for farmers, while writer Andy reports on modern industrial farming before returning to sustenance farming in Port William.
This yearning for a time and way of farming from the past is not simply nostalgia, but a critique of modern industrial farming and a larger economy of extraction.
An ever-present hum of lament reverberates through Berry’s pages. Andy’s grandpa Marce lived within an economy of self-sustenance that “was an ancient wealth sounder than dollars,” and a way of life that Andy loved deeply. Yet, “he did not begin consciously to honor and love it until he saw it going away.” Berry writes himself into this character, whose mourning of the farming ways of old echoes Berry’s grief. This yearning for a time and way of farming from the past is not simply nostalgia, but a critique of modern industrial farming and a larger economy of extraction. Andy, like Berry, has grown up between these two eras, experiencing one as a youth (and through the telling of family stories) and as an adult farming within the latter era in ways that go against the grain of modernity. In this, Berry laments, as he often does, the loss of fidelity to land. Where the land was once our partner in sustaining us, it is now too often seen as a resource to exploit.
Marce Catlett is, of course, fiction, but it also straddles autobiography and an instruction manual on the planting, growing and harvesting of tobacco. Readers may find the chapters’ somewhat disparate nature and meandering plotline distracting at times. Each chapter, however, plays a role in sharing the context through which Wheeler and Andy take their place in the generational story of Marce’s tobacco sale.
This may well be the last time readers venture to Port William with Berry, now in his early 90s. Those familiar with his earlier work, Andy Catlett, will understand these characters more deeply, though his new book stands alone. Readers, new or longstanding, will be grateful to have read Marce Catlett, and will appreciate it as a conduit once more for Berry’s important perspective and critique on our belonging to community and land. The book deeply implores us to acknowledge the stories that we ourselves live into and that shape our understanding of the world around us. Whether familial, biblical or fictional, we are all shaped by stories, and Berry reminds us through his that tending to them is important work.
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