Watch With Me
and Six Other Stories of the Yet-Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, Née Quinch
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“A small treasure of a book . . . part of a long line that descends from Chaucer to Katherine Mansfield to William Trevor.” —Chicago Tribune
This volume of six linked stories and the novella from which the book derives its title is set in Port William from 1908 to the Second World War. Here Wendell Berry introduces two of his more indelible and poignant characters, Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie, remarkable for the comic and affectionate range that—with the mastery of this consummate storyteller working at the height of his powers—here approaches the Shakespearean.
Tol Proudfoot is huge, outsized, in the tradition of the mythic. The three–hundred–pound farmer, personally imposing and unkempt, is also the most graceful of presences, reserved and gallant toward his tiny wife, the ninety–pound schoolteacher.
Their contrasts are humorous, of course, and recall the tall tales of rural Americana. In the novella Watch with Me, we are given a story of such depth, breadth, and importance it earns being listed as one of the most important short stories written in the American language during the twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lumbering, likable, easygoing Kentucky farmer Ptolemy (``Tol'') Proudfoot, who weighs around 300 pounds, might at first seem an unlikely match for dainty, neat, tiny, prim schoolteacher Minnie Quinch, but their marriage in 1908, after a courtship begun at a cake auction, thrives through mutual adjustments, small discoveries and abiding love. Berry ( What Are People For? ), noted essayist, poet, novelist and Kentucky farmer, infuses these seven quietly moving stories--set in Port William, Ky., the small town that Berry has visited so often before in his fiction--with sly humor. Their deceptively simple plots, following the couple for 33 years, deal with Minnie's sole whiskey binge, the Proudfoots' disastrous ride to a state fair in their new Model A coupe, the town misfit's apparent suicide threat and so forth. With the simplicity of folk tales, these stories beautifully evoke a world where people live in relatively harmony with nature, the land and community, and where neighborliness and human scale still matter. ( Sept.)
