Book Review: Hannah Coulter

"This is my story, my giving of thanks."

It's all right there, the final sentence of the first chapter of Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter. If you're ready, willing, and able to believe in a character--a woman, a wife, and a mother--who is about to tell you a story she characterizes as thanksgiving, you'll like the novel. If you think it's a silly, pious thing to say, in all likelihood you won't.

Let me put it this way, if you like Hannah Coulter, you'll like Hannah Coulter, if that makes sense. 

Similar to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Berry's novel is all about the narrator. Like John Ames, Hannah Coulter is serious, thoughtful, loving, and grounded in time and place. The only attitude she carries that separates her from today's MAGA crowd is her deep spirituality, a faith that's so much greater than the flag-waving, me-and-my-sweet Jesus evangelicalism, so apart from that that it may well seem as if it's not there at all. But have a look once more at that sentence at the top of the page. She's about to spin her story of thanksgiving as an act of thanksgiving. 

To say that very little happens in Hannah Coulter isn't wrong. As does John Ames, what Hannah tells us amounts to little more than a story of someone who loved well in a Kentucky town so small it may not have a future. Hers is a life on the land, a life of hard work, and not without significant loss: her first husband, father of her only daughter, does not return from the war that tasks the entire community.

Her second husband--the father of her two boys--is also a vet, a man who, characteristically maybe, simply doesn't talk about Okinawa, where, she discovers after his death, he likely experienced the depths of hell. It's a mark of the strength of her character that she undertakes, after Nathan's death, a comprehensive study of what he might have witnessed in that battle and others in Pacific Theater. When he's gone, she determines she owes him an understanding of what he wouldn't--and probably couldn't-- tell her. 

She was twelve when her mother died, when her father was remarried to a woman her grandfather claimed was pretty sure she'd be the only one in heaven--and maybe her two boys. To call what grew between them "a rift," understates what happened the newly congregated family. 

In place of a mother who loved her, Hannah says she grew up with a beloved grandma.

She was an old-fashioned housewife: determined and skillful and saving and sparing. She worked hard, provided much, bought little, and saved everything that might be of use, buttons and buckles and rags and string and paper sacks from the store. She mended leaky pans, patched clothes, and darned socks. She used the end of a turkey's wing as a broom to sweep around the stove.

Grandmom is the kind of character one doesn't see around much any more. Hannah Coulter is almost shocking in its open portrayal of what we may well call righteousness. Hannah Coulter is wonderful--thoughtful, gracious, loving. If you find it hard to imagine loving a novel with a central character, a narrator in fact, who is all of those things, don't try. Just pick up a copy of Hannah Coulter. 

Her love of the world in which she lives is a theme in almost everything Wendell Berry writes, and it's here again in spades. The fact is, Hannah Coulter is more than happy in her place in life--she's thankful for it and in it. While she believes the world outside Port Williams offers too many seductions, she's not given in the least to self-righteousness or paranoia. What she's learned is that place is home, and home is blessing. What her first husband, Virgil, gave her, she says, was the blessing of home.

Of all the kind things he did for me, that house was the kindest. It was a play house, a dream house sure enough, and yet it was the realest thing of all that time. In it we met and were together on the condition only of loving each other. We lived the dearest minutes of our marriage in that dream house, in the real firelight, under the real stars. And when Virgil went away that time I had something of him with me that I would keep.

You can read that paragraph for what it says about Virgil, but if you fail to read it for what it says about her, you'll miss the story's profound strengths. 

A character named Burley Coulter, who barely makes an appearance in the novel, but plays a role akin to a coyote is to Native American literature, a nasty little, fascinating character. Burley gets some good lines in despite staying off stage. "All women is brothers," Hannah claims Burley's said it, and she dishes out his wiry wisdom whenever she chooses to employ it. 

But Burley's right. The book is a novel in the shape of a memoir, and the life it fashions is a woman's life. I mean no discredit when I say that the novel is a woman's book. Hannah has fallen deeply in love twice. When the man of her dreams doesn't return from the war, she finds herself falling again, this time for a neighbor. Both of those stories are love stories, but how she defines and describes each of them is thoughtfully, thoroughly female. 

Bottom line?--Hannah Coulter is a lovely woman. She makes Hannah Coulter a lovely novel. You'll not find many like it.