Overview

Andy Catlett is nine years old when his Uncle Andrew is murdered. Still haunted by the death as an adult, Andy works to gather details of the tragedy from the fragile memories of family, neighbors, and friends. This beautiful, bittersweet novel was featured by Booklist , Library Journal , and the Louisville Courier-Journal as one of the best books of 1996. It is the summer of 1944, and nine-year-old Andy Catlett is engrossed in the wide easy countryside near Port William, Kentuckythe clear, cool water of Chathan Spring, fields full of tumblebugs and meadowlarks, and a sky so huge it seems a great gape of vision. But sadness, loss, and mystery invade Andys world on a hot July afternoon when his Uncle Andrew is murdered. No one tells the boy why his uncle and namesake was killed, and the question follows him into manhood.As the adult Andy revisits family history to gather fragments of truth about his uncle and the murder, he begins to understand the limits of fact, namely that the truth about us, though it must lie all around us every day, is mostly hidden from us, like birds nests in the woods.

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By the prolific poet, novelist, and social critic (Watch With Me, 1994; Fidelity, 1992, etc.), an elegiac celebration of the end of innocence. Berry's fifth novel and ninth work of fiction is set, like most of his spare, exact work, in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. Andy Catlett, the narrator, looks back from the present at the moment when his idyllic childhood came to an end, in the summer of 1944, when he was nine years old. His beloved Uncle Andrew, a man who savored company, talk, some kind of to-do, something to laugh at above everything, is shot down, for unclear reasons, by the surly Carp Harmon. It is the first time that death has touched someone Andy knows, and despite the gentle support of his extended family (few contemporary writers dwell as much, or as movingly, on the complex nature of familial love), life suddenly seems less certain and right. Years later, a still troubled Andy attempts to discover why Carp Harmon (who served only two years in a state prison for the crime) killed his uncle. He seeks out his uncle's old friends in Port William, and out of their vigorous talk a portrait of a close-knit, resourceful, modest community emerges, but no easy answers. Memories are hazy, the possibilities raised disturbing but unprovable. What does emerge, though, is a portrait of Uncle Andrew as a robust but troubled man, trapped in a suffocating marriage, uneasy in his responsibilities. Berry deftly balances Andy's investigation into the town's past with an equally moving portrait of his growing realization not only of the sustaining value of memory but of the manner in which people are shaped in enduring ways by what they love. This is a modest, resonant work, both a sharp portrait of a small farming town nursing its secrets over several decades, and a penetrating celebration of the hold of family on the imagination. (Kirkus Reviews)

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