A World Lost—Wendell Berry

In this 1996 novel, Berry once again explores the relatively mundane life of a rural community in Kentucky, a community very much like the one in which he and his family have lived for generations. These novels demonstrate the profundity of the commonplace when people live lives connected to place and community.
In A World Lost, Berry presents a sort of faux memoir as the narrator, Andrew Catlett, considers the murder of an uncle of the same name. Even though a good deal more drama would seem to attach to a tale of murder, there is nothing of the suspense novel in this volume. We learn early on that Uncle Andrew has been killed and who the killer is. While the motive of the assailant, Carp Harmon, remains ambiguous to the end, even young Andy’s search for that knowledge does not provide any actual sense of conflict.
Instead of drawing his novel’s energy from the forward momentum of plot and revelation, Berry allows interest to grow by accretion as the varied and long-developing effects of the life and death of Uncle Andrew play out through the various branches of the Catlett family.
While Berry draws this story out over 151 pages, he, I believe, overplays the matter by a good twenty pages. Significant stretches of the story drag rather painfully. However, the fact that he can maintain interest for as long as he does testifies to his powerful ear and eye.
This novel, focused on the rather disparate life and unsurprisingly violent end of a black sheep of a family, brings to mind the account of Paul Maclean in “A River Runs through It.” In both cases, an inexplicable but not unexpected violent death places a permanent mark on a family. While the death of Paul Maclean does not take place until the close of Norman Maclean’s novella and that of Andrew Catlett happens at the outset of Berry’s, it remains largely separate from but inextricably linked to all of the other events of the book.
In both tales, two brothers take quite different routes, evoking Cain and Abel (or Seth); Abraham and Lot; Jacob and Esau; and Joseph and his ten elder brothers. Despite not being brothers, the similarity with Abraham and Lot is perhaps the most illuminating here. When it becomes clear that their wealth and servants have become too great for them to remain together, Abraham and Lot agree to separate. Given the choice of directions, Lot looks toward the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, while Abraham remains a rural man. Decided rural in outlook, Wheeler Catlett, the narrator’s father, is a lawyer and a very solid, upright citizen. Most significant in Berry’s worldview, Wheeler, despite his profession, remains at heart a farmer. Andrew, on the other hand, even when he moves back to his home town and tends a pair of farms owned by the family, maintains a good measure of the urban sensitivity he has developed in his years away.
Like Norman Maclean’s narrator agonizing over the troubles of Paul, Wheeler Catlett can never release the memory of his brother nor absolve himself of all responsibility in his brother’s death.
For the Christian reader, themes of election, free will, and the pervasiveness of sin drench the reading of A World Lost. Uncle Andrew Catlett demonstrates time and again his inability to govern his actions, his apparent predisposition to a dissolute and self-destructive life. Yet his death comes from what may very well be an act of random violence. Carp Harmon’s motive for shooting Andrew remains cloaked in mystery. Such, in Berry’s world and as in the world of Job, is life. Things happen, not always for clear reasons. Sometimes human folly leads to a downfall, but other difficulties arise apparently from nowhere. The question, for Berry and for the Christian reader, is not why things occur but how these events, once they have occurred will play out across time.