---
product_id: 42345652
title: "Nathan Coulter: A Novel (Port William)"
brand: "wendell berry"
price: "¥5529"
currency: JPY
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 10
url: https://www.desertcart.jp/products/42345652-nathan-coulter-a-novel-port-william
store_origin: JP
region: Japan
---

# Nathan Coulter: A Novel (Port William)

**Brand:** wendell berry
**Price:** ¥5529
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Nathan Coulter: A Novel (Port William) by wendell berry
- **How much does it cost?** ¥5529 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.jp](https://www.desertcart.jp/products/42345652-nathan-coulter-a-novel-port-william)

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- wendell berry enthusiasts

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## Description

Nathan Coulter: A Novel (Port William)

## Images

![Nathan Coulter: A Novel (Port William) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/416REmh5OdL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    "One day they'll shovel it in your face, and that'll be the end of it."
  

*by R***N on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 5, 2014*

Port William, Kentucky is to Wendell Berry's fiction what Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi is to William Faulkner's.  First published in 1960, NATHAN COULTER was the first of Berry's Port Williams novels.  It was revised and reissued in its present form in 1985.  (I do not know how extensive the re-working was.  If anyone does know, I would appreciate hearing about it.)The time of NATHAN COULTER is the mid-1930's.  Nathan Coulter, then around thirteen years old, recounts the major events of about two years of his life on the family farm, outside Port William.  He and his older brother Tom get into mischief, blowing up a boy's pet crow with a dynamite cap poked up the crow's bunghole; their mother dies and they go to live with their grandparents and uncle on the next farm over; they take in the attractions of a Fourth of July carnival, including a tent featuring "Bubbles: Bewitching Enchantress of the Far East"; their dad's barn burns down; Nathan and Uncle Burley go fishing and catch the biggest catfish seen in that area in living memory; all the males join together in cutting tobacco, in the course of which Tom gets into a fight with his father and leaves to go off on his own; raccoon hunting in winter; cutting hay the next summer.  It is the seasonal ebb and flow of agricultural life, punctuated by a few deaths and one birth, a few minor tragedies and a few shooting stars of excitement.In essence, NATHAN COULTER is the story of one boy over a narrow slice of time amidst the larger story of the land and the cycle of generations that live off of it.  If the reader focuses solely on the boy's story, the novel might seem dull and flat.  If you look to the bigger picture, the story has more depth and potentially more meaning, but it still is not reassuring or uplifting.  The comfort of the "Port William membership" is not yet evident.  At this early stage of Berry's fictional universe, the prevailing message is expressed by Nathan's Daddy, who during a break in a day of back-breaking tobacco-cutting, says, "Well, you work on this damned old dirt and sweat over it and worry about it, and then one day they'll shovel it in your face, and that'll be the end of it."

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    dark, but not gloomy
  

*by D***R on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 8, 2017*

Wendell Berry introduces us to a young man I understand to be a mainstay of his fiction, Nathan Coulter, with the word 'dark':'Dark. The light went out the door when she pulled it to. And then everything came in close around me, the way it was in the daylight, only all close. Because in the dark, I could remember and not see. The sun was first, going over the hill behind our barn. Then the river was covered with the shadows of the hills. Then the hills went behind their shadows, and just the house and the barn and the other buildings were left, standing black against the sky where it was still white in the west.'I hedge my description with the words '(as) I understand', because NATHAN COULTER: A NOVEL is my own rather carefully chosen introduction to Wendell Berry the writer, Wendell Berry the novelist, and Coulter and his kin. That first paragraph sets some of Berry's major literary artifacts in their place, what with its mention of darkness and light, house and barn, sun, hills, river, and shadows. Always shadows.As I'd been warned, the pace of Berry's fiction-writing pen is a slow one, perhaps as befits the pace of the rural Kentucky life he describes. Yet slow never need mean shallow, in fact just the opposite.Already, a newbie to Berry and Berrian fiction, this reader can see that things in Berry's world—in Nathan Coulter's world—are rarely as they appear to be, seldom as an outsider might presume them to be on first evidence. The holy are not necessarily so, the profane more insightful and even merciful than expected, the shadows sometimes full of light as well as darkness.I can hardly wait for whatever happens next.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Best book I've read every
  

*by A***R on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 30, 2022*

Loved the book so much. One gets into the people's lives. Have read Hannah Coulter too.  One can reflect for hours after finishing a book. Hope to read all in the series.

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*Product available on Desertcart Japan*
*Store origin: JP*
*Last updated: 2026-02-08*