Jayber Crow : the life story of Jayber Crow, barber, of the Port William membership, as written by himself by Wendell Berry
Published 2000 · 115,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction
How hard is Jayber Crow : the life story of Jayber Crow, barber, of the Port William membership, as written by himself to read?
Jayber Crow : the life story of Jayber Crow, barber, of the Port William membership, as written by himself scores 33 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- Berry writes in a plain, rural Kentucky voice with farm and church vocabulary. It reads closer to The Remains of the Day in clarity than to anything ornate.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Jayber speaks in measured, conversational sentences with occasional long, reflective periods. The syntax is clearer than Gatsby's.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Questions of faith, vocation and belonging come up, but they stay anchored in barbering, farming, funerals and weather. Ideas arrive through concrete events, as in To Kill a Mockingbird.
- Information density: 32 out of 100
- The pace is slow and episodic, with a modest cast of townspeople and farm detail. Nothing demands the attention that a panoramic novel would.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- Jayber tells his story directly and says what he feels. Readers still infer some of Mattie's inner life and what the town's changes mean.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- The river, the graveyard and the barbershop carry quiet meaning, but Berry never makes them cryptic. The symbolism is restrained, like Ishiguro's.
- Ironic distance: 28 out of 100
- Jayber has a gentle self-deprecating humor, but the book is earnest in its love and moral argument. Irony is minor.
- Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
- The plot comes to a clear close, though Jayber's questions about God and love remain partly open. It is more resolved than The Great Gatsby.
- Structural complexity: 25 out of 100
- One retrospective narrator tells a mostly chronological life in short chapters. The structure is closer to a memoir than to a puzzle.
How Jayber Crow : the life story of Jayber Crow, barber, of the Port William membership, as written by himself is regarded
Jayber Crow : the life story of Jayber Crow, barber, of the Port William membership, as written by himself holds a literary regard score of 54 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.