Wendell Berry and six other recent books

Fiction

Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story

Wendell Berry
Counterpoint, 176 pages

Now 91, Wendell Berry has been writing about the fictional community of Port William, Ky., since his mid 20s, when he first published Nathan Coulter. Berry’s fiction, alongside his many poems and essays, has attempted to honor the culture of rural communities for whom the good life is defined by fidelity, frugality, and reverence, arguing that postmodernity has been hostile if not downright antipodal to such virtues. Americans have abandoned such communities, he argues, even as nostalgia for prewar Americana emerged as a billion-­dollar industry. Berry’s newest novel, Marce Catlett, is among his most aggressive fictional shots across modernity’s bow, a melancholy book that is angry but never vindictive, sorrowful but never bitter. It’s the story of a memory that defines an entire community across multiple generations, shaping the way its membership conceives of itself and proceeds with its work. That memory is passed to readers through Andy Catlett, Berry’s most familiar creation who has long been presented as a keeper of the flame. He recalls the story of the brutal harvest of 1906, when Andy’s grandfather, Marce, discovers that, thanks to the efforts of a single magnate, the crop’s yield won’t cover even the cost of getting it to auction. A year’s work may as well have been burned. The novel describes the way that catastrophic season shaped those who came of age. What happens, Andy asks, when you have a healthy culture that provides life, employment, camaraderie, stability, family, and vision “and you lose it all at once and have nothing to replace it?” In answering that question, Marce Catlett is Berry at his elegiac best, even as it hews more closely to his essays and Mad Farmer poems than to his most beloved novels. The novel has an argument, there’s no doubt, but in the voice of old Andy Catlett the story of that empty harvest weaves with the many stories found across Port Williams. And for as much as it simmers with an underlying fury, it’s a book that glistens with gratitude for what was and hope yet for the world to come. —David Kern

Social theory

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows …

Steven Pinker
Scribner, 384 pages

In this book, Pinker, a cognitive scientist with a talent for clear prose, tackles the concept of “common knowledge”—the transition from private awareness to shared certainty—and how this shift influences everything from politics to personal life. He begins with the emperor’s new clothes, showing how a child’s blunt truth turned suspicion into collective recognition. From there, he argues that common knowledge explains why money works, why social norms stick, why dictators fear protests, and why reputations can collapse overnight online. A Super Bowl ad, a viral math puzzle, or a single tweet can each create the spark that changes behavior once people realize everyone else is paying attention. Pinker brings abstract theory to life with sharp examples: Apple’s 1984 ad, the fall of an ordinary woman who became notorious overnight, the rituals of language and innuendo. His prose is fast, witty, and easy to follow, but he sometimes tries to fit chaotic events into neat frames, leaning toward optimism that can feel naive. Still, this is Pinker at his most readable, a lively exploration of how shared awareness shapes power, order, and everyday life. —John Mac Ghlionn

Read WORLD’s full review of this book here.

Science fiction satire

Maxine Justice: Public Offender

Daniel Schwabauer
Enclave, 256 pages

After a galactic-level fall from grace, lawyer Maxine Justice hopes to save her struggling practice by picking up clients as a public defender in a televised corporate-run night court. Instead, she finds a new robot judge dead in her office, and Father Barthes, an android priest with a penchant for conspiracy theories, standing over the body. The “podre” is promptly accused of the judge’s demise but refuses to defend himself, citing the confidentiality of confession. When Ms. Justice is assigned to represent Barthes in his murder trial, she is pulled into a dangerous world of shady robots, evil corporations, and aliens of questionable intent. Oh, and her cat is missing, too. Instead of Douglas Adams’ sardonic bite or Terry Pratchett’s freewheeling absurdity, author Daniel Schwabauer writes with a sarcastic zaniness. He also infuses Maxine with sincerity and determination, expertly balancing emotional themes of forgiveness and trust with stellar deadpan humor. While the first book in the series, Maxine Justice: Galactic Attorney, gives context and its own hilarious action-packed story, Public Offender provides the reader everything needed to enjoy this sequel on its own. —L.G. McCary

Theology and the arts

The Wages of Cinema

Crystal L. Downing
IVP Academic, 256 pages

Even during the time of Plato, our pagan intellectual ancestors lambasted the arts as purveyors of sin, disorder, and excess, and Christians have long held their own resentments toward the arts. From the outset of the cinema in 1897, Protestants and Catholics alike have believed the medium is escapist pablum that exposes impressionable minds to sex and violence. The Wages of Cinema, a recent book on film theory, challenges this assertion. In this book Downing, a devotee and leading scholar of English writer Dorothy L. Sayers, condemns low-effort consumption and low-effort craftsmanship, equally calling viewers to task for demanding shallow, propagandistic entertainment as well as filmmakers and financiers who produce it. She argues it amounts to a serious spiritual heresy wherein the creation of art is severed from the divine source of all creation. Drawing on Sayers’ rich theology of art, Downing argues that true artistry fulfills the imago dei, and calls upon Christians to avoid treating cinema as “a content delivery system.” Her work offers a scholarly and challenging exploration of the nature of medium and craftsmanship. —Tyler Hummel

Read WORLD’s full review of this book here.

Dystopian fiction

Scavenger

Bradley Caffee
Mountain Brook Ink, 294 pages

After a global pandemic, 90% of the world’s population is gone. Now Jimmy Hunter and his two best friends use a drone to help them safely scavenge for tradable goods because without something to sell to the criminal overlords of their city, the three friends will go hungry. The most valuable good, however, is information. When Jimmy learns of top secret underground bunkers with prized resources and uninfected inhab­itants, he has a dangerous choice to make. He can either share his intel and join the criminal Brotherhood or try to escape with only one of his friends to find the Keepers’ bunker. The cost of such a choice might be more than he’s willing to pay. Caffee masterfully weaves clear Scriptural themes into his character-driven novel without being too preachy. Readers may recognize certain elements of his dystopian worldbuilding, yet the spiritual journey of the characters breathes new life into the apocalypse. Scavenger is just the first book of Caffee’s The Keeper Series. —Marian Jacobs

Political science

The Collapse of Global Liberalism

Philip Pilkington
Polity, 224 pages

This provocative new book proclaims the death of the liberal order, claiming we are now living through the final cadaveric spasms of the world system created after the Second World War. Liberalism, according to Pilkington, is a leveling, flattening force, defined by its opposition to hierarchy. Economically, it reduces all human relations to contractual exchanges that replace natural, heterogeneous hierarchies. After the Cold War, the West assumed that the rest of the world would willingly embrace liberal ideology and economic liberalism. But many nations haven’t. And Western nations themselves continue to crumble under liberalism’s logic. The reality is that the liberal moment is over and that it was destined to collapse. Liberalism, he contends, is a “dark and uncivilized philosophy of life,” inherently “unstable” because it is “unnatural” and irrational. By eroding the preliberal sources on which it depends, it ensures the destruction of any civilization it touches. Pilkington hopes to help postliberal societies retrieve classical sources capable of recivilizing the West. At root, liberalism’s error is this denial of the human need for hierarchy; hence its antagonism toward religion, which testifies to the hierarchies in creation and creation’s relation to the Creator. —James R. Wood

Read WORLD’s full review of this book here.

Crime fiction

After That, the Dark

Andrew Klavan
Mysterious Press, 336 pages

Award-winning crime writer and conservative commentator Andrew Klavan is back with his fifth novel about superspy-turned-English-professor Cameron Winter. In this installment, a locked-room murder catches Cameron’s attention, and when Cameron starts tugging at the threads of the mystery, he unravels a conspiracy involving a powerful biotech company. The plot contains the pointed social critique found in some of Klavan’s other novels. In this one, a billionaire attempts to use his vast resources to cure humanity of sin, but this secular offer of redemption only causes greater suffering. The story, with its twists and turns, showcases Klavan’s skill at constructing plots and action scenes, but this novel contains a fatal flaw. Cameron has fallen in love, and Klavan’s romantic dialogue has the charm of a jackhammer at midnight. To make matters worse, Cameron’s love interest is a self-proclaimed Bible thumper who willingly falls into bed with the agnostic Cameron but betrays no hint of self-consciousness or remorse. After That, the Dark is a disappointing installment to an otherwise engaging series. —Collin Garbarino