Tender Grapes : FIDELITY, By Wendell Berry (Pantheon: $20; 201 pp.)

The rarest (and highest) of literary classes consists of that small group of authors who are absolutely inimitable. You know at once that this can only be Emily Dickinson--or J. D. Salinger, or Franz Kafka.

It’s possible, of course, to burlesque the way they write, and many do. There was a time when you could hardly pick up a copy of Esquire without finding a pseudo-Salinger story among the fiction. Half the paranoid writers in theworld have attempted to sound the Kafka note, and many poets have run the Dickinson dash. But because the uniqueness of Dickinson and the others comes as much from the way they view the world as from any arrangements they make with language, the imitation cannot fully succeed.

One of the half-dozen living American authors who belong in this class is Wendell Berry. Berry started his career as a poet (and one who is, in my opinion, imitable). Without abandoning poetry, he has gone on to be both a novelist and an environmental prophet. He has gained a double triumph.

As prophet, he wrote that remarkable book “The Unsettling of America,” which has shown countless environmentalists something of the right relationship between human beings and nature--and, incidentally, between wives and husbands.

As novelist, Berry has produced at least two masterpieces. The greater of them is called “A Place on Earth,” and the lesser (but still inimitable) one “The Memory of Old Jack.” Both are set in rural Kentucky, where Berry himself is set. He has a farm, and farms it.

Both novels concern the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, and they share many of the same characters. They also share a nostalgia for the past. “A Place on Earth” (final version, 1983) takes place in the spring of 1945, just before the revolution in farm machinery came to shake and partially destroy the American countryside. “The Memory of Old Jack” (1975) goes back still further.

Now, in the volume of stories called “Fidelity,” Berry has taken a look at Port William in 1992. What he sees is a wounded but still powerful culture. Port William has lost most of its tiny commercial center--there were once four stores in town--to shopping centers out on the interstate.

In the longest and best story, a man named Burley Coulter is dying. Burley was a vigorous, even a randy man in middle age in “A Place on Earth,” but now he is 82, and failing fast. He has been taken to a hospital in Louisville, and is now being kept artificially alive with machines. At, of course, enormous cost.

In the story, his grown son Danny rescues him from the hospital at night, and gets him back to Port William. Not to die in his bed--the state regards Danny’s act as kidnaping, and sends a detective to find the old man and bring him back to the hospital and the tubes--to die hidden in the woods, with the knowledge and collaboration of the town.

It is not a perfect story. Berry loads the dice a little, I think, when he goes into the mind of the state detective, and there is a consequent slight loss of plausibility. And Berry’s humor in the comic scenes (there are several, as the state cop confronts the town) is not quite so gloriously funny as the best scenes in “A Place on Earth.” But the whole book is still vintage Berry. It’s just that the ’92 vintage, unique and not possibly coming from any other vineyard, is not quite up to the ’83.

There is one other question to ask, of course. Will this wine travel? Or can it only be drunk with full pleasure by rural Kentuckians, and maybe folks in Tennessee?

The answer is simple. One needn’t care a thing about either Kentucky or farming to relish Wendell Berry. I can say that with real authority. Three times now, I have assigned Berry in a large environmental-literature course at Dartmouth College. Almost none of our students grew up on farms, and only 16 out of 4,000 come from Kentucky. (There are 311 from California.)

Three times now the students have picked “A Place on Earth” as the greatest work in the course. “Fidelity” is not that good, but it is noble writing. A premier cru classe.