"Hannah Coulter": A formidable woman looks back at love and war

In his seventh novel set in the fictional Kentucky farming community of Port William, Wendell Berry revisits a familiar landscape through the memories of a remarkable character.

Hannah Coulter looks back from her seventh decade on a life bracketed by war, in which she lost her first husband, and the slow unraveling of her rural community, which scattered her children to distant cities.

Like many of Berry's memorable characters, Jayber Crow in the novel "Jayber Crow," Jack Beechum in "The Memory of Old Jack" or Hannah's husband, Nathan, in "Nathan Coulter," Hannah finds salvation in her strong ties to her community and her place. Speaking of earning her family's living from the farm they made, she admits, "There was never a way you could stretch a string where our place ended and we began."

This sense of belonging to a community and a place is a recurring theme in Berry's stories, novels and essays. He has fleshed it out in more than a dozen works of fiction through generations of colorful Port William citizens. With the character of Hannah Coulter, he puts this theme to vigorous test through a kind woman's grief, loss and heartbreak. Hannah discovers that the focal point of her strength lies in her love for those living and gone. "Grief is not a force and has no power to hold. You only bear it," she confides. "Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark."

Hannah lost her mother while still a child. She survived her father's troubled second marriage through the good graces of a savvy grandmother who nurtured and prepared her for her life as a woman. She suffered a second stunning loss when her young husband was killed in Europe in 1945, leaving her pregnant with their first child.

When she married again to Nathan, a veteran who lost a brother in the same war, it was a love born of shared grief.

The life they made, raising a family and rebuilding a run-down farm, Hannah understood was a life in opposition to war. Though they never spoke of Nathan's wartime experiences (he fought in the blistering battle of Okinawa), the presence of war's horror was a quiet undercurrent running through their marriage. This knowledge lent a kind of grace to their lives and to the lives of those around them.

Berry, who has been an eloquent and outspoken critic of current foreign policy, handles these themes deftly. As always in Berry's work, family, faith, community and a shared mutual regard provide a bridge across these gulfs of sorrow. But as Hannah's children and grandchildren grow and succumb to economic forces no longer tied to the land, her footing falters.

Berry is at his best when his characters' competent, self-sufficient lives are thrust against the brutal forces of modernity. The clash strikes at the foundation values of hard work, decency, trust. And it drives his characters to deeper, truer realizations.

After Nathan's death, Hannah, now in her late 70s, researches the battle of Okinawa in which he fought. Through her investigations she discovers what Nathan long knew, that the "wind-driven fire" of war can flare up anywhere. And that their quiet life in Port William, all life, exists "within a circle of fire" that might one day close upon it.

"Hannah Coulter" is set in the latter half of the past century, but like the best contemporary fiction, it is informed by our present moment.