ByFaith invited writers to select a novel to review that our readers might consider for their summer reading lists.
One day I was browsing in my favorite bookstore when I came across a copy of “Hannah Coulter.” Below the book was a small placard touting the merits of the book, so my attention was captured. I decided to talk to the bookseller about the title, and she told me a story.
She said she once wrote a letter to the author, Wendell Berry, to which he responded with an invitation to travel to his home in Kentucky to join him and his wife for lunch. A writer who would take such an interest in his readers, I thought, is one worthy of my attention. So I bought the book.
“Hannah Coulter” is the eighth in a series of 12 books written from the perspectives of different residents in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky. This is not a story of unexpected plot twists and sensational surprises. It’s simply a woman who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II reflecting on the ups and downs of her life, all through the lens of a melancholy hopefulness, like a Sigur Rós song. It’s beautifully written, full of simple insight and gratitude, sometimes funny, and worthy of emulation.
As we move through the narrative, we find that the book is just as much about the people of Port William as it is about Hannah. There’s even a family tree in the back of the book detailing the ancestry of the town’s citizens, among them being the barber Jayber Crow, who is the subject of Berry’s most well-known novel (Port William book 6).
Through the routine experiences of Hannah and her friends, readers gain insight into our sense of place, the influence of modernity, and even the responsibility of pastoring.
Port William is a rural community left behind by the world. It’s not the kind of town people aspire to live in, but it’s a place where its citizens want to be. This is mostly because the people aren’t looking to get ahead in the world. They “aren’t trying to ‘get someplace.’ They think they are someplace.” Port William folks are simple and hard-working people of the land who stick close to one another, trust one another, eat meals together, go to church together, and try to maintain an old way of life.
They know how “to keep house, to raise a garden or a crop, to care for livestock, to break a mule or shoe one, to fix a motor and almost anything else, to hunt, fish, trap, preserve a hide, hive a swarm, cook or preserve anything edible, and to take pleasure in such things.” They are, humanly speaking, good people living ordinary lives in an increasingly extraordinary way as their old manner of life is slowly swallowed up in the fomenting currents of a new era.
Hannah observes that “most people now are looking for a ‘better place,’ which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one.”
Later in the story, she mentions a family named the Branches. They have led a “futureless life,” not in the sense that they are carelessly neglecting to plan ahead, but in the sense that they are content with who God made them to be, and where he has put them in this world. “They aren’t going any place, they aren’t getting ready to become anything but what they are . . .”
In other words, they have learned the secret of being content. Isn’t that what we lament about the ubiquitous and pernicious influence of social media? It makes us long to be what others are, not what God has made us to be.
As in much of Berry’s writing, modern technology takes a beating here. Hannah and her husband Nathan have no fondness for modern farming techniques. Nathan worked as a farmer because he loved it, and because “he knew this farm as he knew the inside of his clothes.”
“Hannah Coulter” forces us to consider: can we benefit from advances in human culture and technology which are the product of instinctive obedience to God’s creation mandate, while at the same time sifting out the elements of godlessness and worldliness that will naturally come with them?
Berry, who is a farmer as well as a writer, penned an essay in 1987 titled, “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” in which he insisted that he did almost all of his farming work with horses, and preferred to write with pencil and paper, in the daytime (without the use of electric light).
In his response to critiques of the essay, Berry rejected the view that “the past was gloomy, drudgery-ridden, servile, meaningless and slow,” while the present, “thanks only to purchasable products, is meaningful, bright, lively, centralized and fast.” (In the year 2026, one has to wonder if Berry still doesn’t have a computer, but I am reasonably confident that he doesn’t have an Instagram account).
One obvious pushback on Berry’s Luddite views is the fact that the American landscape has drastically changed in the last 200 years. In the year 1820, about 80 percent of the population lived on farms. In 1920, that percentage had dropped to about 30 percent, and today it’s close to 2 percent. That’s the reality. But it’s also true that Berry is not wrong to raise probing questions about what technology is doing to us. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.
I heard someone say once that if you want to know how to be a pastor, you need to read “Hannah Coulter.” It’s an odd thing to say because the book really has nothing to do with pastoring, but it does have a lot to do with the deep workings of the human heart, with all of its hopes, dreams, pleasures, disappointments, and sufferings.
Hannah had to bear her own grief, and she had a pastor to help her. But, on the way out of church one Sunday morning Hannah observes, “poor Brother Preston would struggle again with his terrible duty and need to bring comfort to the comfortless.” This, of course, is what every pastor wants to do, but isn’t always very good at. “We would shake his hand at the door as we went out, trying, I suppose, to console him for his wish to help what only could be endured.”
It’s one of the trickiest challenges a pastor faces: In the aftermath of unspeakable tragedy, how do you avoid saying nothing, because you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, and saying something stupid, because you want so badly to say the right thing?
Hannah’s grief did not express itself in anger at God, but she did get mad at people who “took it on themselves to speak for (the deceased) after he was dead. I dislike for the dead to be made to agree with whatever some powerful living person wants to say.” As a pastor, have I done that? Probably.
There is always something to be learned from our grief, but maybe it’s better that people are allowed to discover those lessons on their own, rather than being told what they should think. Eventually, Hannah could say, “I began to trust the world again, not to give me what I wanted, for I saw that it could not be trusted to do that, but to give unforeseen goods and pleasures that I had not thought to want.”
This is one of those books you’ll want to read again. And again. A young woman could do much worse than to say, “When I grow up, I want to be like Hannah.” She is a wise and godly woman who has learned a lot about life and how to live it, and without the assistance of AI.
“You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: ‘Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”
Bob O’Bannon serves as senior pastor of New Life Presbyterian Church in Yorktown, Indiana.