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Summary
Summary
Since her astonishing debut, The Beans of Egypt, Maine , best-selling novelist Carolyn Chute has been heralded as a passionate voice of the underclass, earning comparisons to Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Flannery O'Connor. Her first novel in ten years returns to Egypt, and is a rousing, politically charged portrait of a group of lives on the margins of our society. The School on Heart's Content Road spirals out from the story of Mickey Gammon, a fifteen-year-old dropout who has been evicted from his home and introduced to the secretive world of the Settlement. Run by "The Prophet," the Settlement is a rural cooperative in alternative energy, farm produce, and locally made goods. Falsely demonized by the media as a compound of sin, the Settlement's true nature remains foreign to outsiders. It is there that Mickey meets another deserted child, six-year-old Jane, whose mother is in jail on trumped-up drug charges. "Secret Agent" Jane cunningly prowls the Settlement in her heart-shaped sunglasses, imagining that her plans to bring down the community will reunite her with her mother. As they struggle to adjust to their new, complex surrogate family, Mickey and Jane witness the mounting unrest within the Settlement's ranks, which soon builds to a shocking and devastating crescendo.
Author Notes
A high school dropout at age 16, Carolyn Chute has been described as a shy, genial woman with idiosyncratic political views. Almost immediately after dropping out of school, Chute married and had a daughter. After the marriage ended in divorce, Chute held a variety of low-paying jobs, including driving a school bus, working on a potato farm, and plucking chickens to support herself and her child.
In 1978, Chute completed high school and began taking classes at the University of Maine. While attending college, Chute started writing stories, and eventually had her work published in area magazines. Chute's first novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, published in 1986, details what it was like growing up in a poverty-stricken town. The characters and setting of her successful first novel were continued in Letourneau's Used Auto Parts (1988) and Merry Men (1994).
A member of the 2nd Maine Militia, Chute is lobbying for several causes. Among the causes are limiting campaign contributions to $100 per citizen, extending the right of free speech and assembly to work-sites and shopping malls, banning lobbyists from the political process, and limiting the number of newspapers or magazines that can be owned by any single corporation to one.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Chute, author of the acclaimed The Beans of Egypt, Maine, returns to Egypt with an emotional but uneven novel portraying the St. Onge Settlement, a rural co-op community led by the mythic, flawed, Gordon St. Onge, hero of the downtrodden who people the Settlement along with Gordon's wives and children. Through her distinctive, muscular prose and vivid depictions of Maine's resilient residents, Chute revisits familiar themes: the government's injustices toward the poor, restrictive gun legislation, faults in the education system and the evils of corporations. The novel also defends and demystifies the militia movement (Chute is involved with the 2nd Maine Militia, a grassroots organization advocating for the working class). The narrative, fractured with a multitude of perspectives, jumps between Gordon, Richard "Rex" York, head of the local militia, and Settlement kids Mickey Gammon, 15, and precocious six-year-old Jane Meserve, whose mother is incarcerated on spurious drug charges. By turns inspiring, then preachy, Chute, who in the acknowledgments says there are five completed novels about the Settlement, which might explain the unresolved story lines, has an undeniable talent for depicting humanity at its most impassioned and impoverished. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985), writer and activist Chute's debut, was embraced as a gutsy variation on The Grapes of Wrath. The saga of the Beans family and their friends occupied her in several subsequent novels, and now she returns with more moxie, righteous indignation, and artistry than ever before to challenge our notions of democracy, family, and fiction. Two homeless children serve as witnesses: quiet, kind 15-year-old Mickey, and 6-year-old Jane, an already vampish, unholy terror whose single mother is in prison. Mickey finds a surrogate father in hypercorrect Rex, the head of the do-good Border Mountain Militia, while Jane is taken in by Gordon St. Onge, the charismatic leader of the Settlement, a crazy, off-the-grid polygamous commune. In this episodic, high-voltage, post-Oklahoma City, and pre-9/11 novel of disenfranchisement and improvised community, Chute whips up a storm of backwoods carnival energy as her gorgeous prose illuminates larger-than-life characters, mythic confrontations, and what exactly poverty, injustice, and the corporate imperative do to body and soul. In the first in a series about the Settlement, Chute has created an audacious novel of compassionate satire and protest straight from the heart of the betrayed working class.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Carolyn Chute's new novel is a love song to a voiceless part of America. LIKE a ferocious bulletin from an alternate universe - tumbling, pellmell, brilliant and strange - comes this explosive and discomfiting fifth novel by Carolyn Chute. Form doesn't just follow feeling in these pages, it chases it helplessly with a butterfly net, casting about in multiple directions, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. But watching Chute miss what she's after is more interesting than watching a lesser, better behaved writer catch tidier prey. "The School on Heart's Content Road" is as idiosyncratic as it is engaging. A mythopoetics of the Second Amendment isn't exactly common in modern American literary fiction. But neither is the depiction of contemporary American poverty: of the slow, relentless grind of never quite having enough, of the leaching of hope and ambition from those for whom a job at Wal-Mart is a rare opportunity, of the impossible double-bind choices made by the poor every day. This is a beautiful novel, a polemical novel, a messy novel. It's a love song to a part of America that doesn't have much of a voice, and is armed. Chute is such an extraordinary, vivid, empathic writer that it would be tempting to swoon into the love and overlook the bullets. To do that, however, would also be to dim the considerable power here: if the despair and the tenderness are real, so are the guns. The justly celebrated author of the novels "The Beans of Egypt, Maine," "Letourneau's Used Auto Parts," "Merry Men" and "Snow Man," Chute long ago claimed a particular swath of Maine's poor as her constituency. She championed their hardscrabble lives, but in a glorious, idiosyncratic, hilarious language that had energy to burn. It was, in words, the equivalent of outsider art: inventive and peculiar, with the autodidact's airy relationship to the rules. She capitalized at will, she barreled through sentences, and she displayed unabashed love for her big, billowing characters. "The School on Heart's Content Road," her first novel in almost 10 years and, according to Chute, the first of a "5-o-gy," jounces away from the Beans toward their nearby neighbors, a (very) loose assemblage of characters who cluster around the St. Onge Settlement, which Chute describes as "a statewide cooperative in furniture, alternative energies, farm produce and trade." The Settlement is decidedly suspicious of the United States government, Nafta and public schooling; residents of the Settlement are very prepared for a global emergency. The book whirls around and through many points of view, including upward of 20 interconnected characters, among them the television set; a crow; the voice of Mammon; F.B.I. agents; the weavers of Halifax, England, in 1819; God; and so on. Chute, a populist, gathers many into her net. Carolyn Chute and her husband, Michael, at home in Parsonsfield, Me. The main story, however, centers on the gradual meeting and loose connections among three characters: Mickey Gammon, a lonely, smart, disaffected 15-year-old dropout who finds a semi-home in the local Border Mountain Militia; 6-year-old Jane Meserve, a biracial child who has found a semi-home at the Settlement because her mother is in jail and her father is gone; and Gordon St. Onge, the charismatic 39-year-old who founded and leads the Settlement and is one craggy, sexy, Acadian devil to boot. When she channels the souls of these complicated, moving individuals, Chute is mesmerizing and heartbreaking, with a dead-on sense of humor. Jane is particularly fond of her dark pink, heart-shaped sunglasses, edged in white, which she calls her "secret agent glasses." Like Harriet the Spy, Jane is recording everything in her notebook for special secret agent purposes - that is, so it can all be told to her mother when she visits her in prison. Mickey isn't particularly violent or paranoid, he's just lost in a world that can't care for him and doesn't care much about him. Gordon, a shambling, hard-working, hard-thinking visionary, is as liable to build a merry-go-round made of monsters and take in outcasts as he is to inveigh against television and "THE GLOBAL BEAST." Jane has an enormous crush on Mickey, who finds his way to Gordon and the Settlement after a series of alienated misadventures. Gordon shelters both lost children in his hand-cranked outpost of civilization. Meanwhile: "The militias grow. And the resisters, the raised fists, the pamphlets, the huddles, the blocking of streets. Cries for liberty, libertad, free will. The hydra coalesces. It is beautiful to its mother." Chute, a militia member herself, is certainly self-aware and nuanced, but she's also, one senses, not really kidding. A section titled "Out in the World" reads, in its entirety: "Today, somewhere in America, more foreclosures. More auctions. Another farmer plots his own death. And another. There is an art to making your death by combine look like an accident." While the book abounds in polemic - the voice of the television is not an admirable one - Chute is too good a writer to polemicize the narrative itself. There are no sentimental victories or defeats here. The government doesn't close in on hapless Settlement residents. Mickey, Jane and Gordon don't become the leaders of a new and better world after the collapse of capitalism. The plot eventually turns on small-scale rivalries and jealousies among compatriots, not on some ultimate showdown between the haves and the have-nots. One of the most moving flights of dialogue in the book isn't Gordon's long, vehement speech to militia members or even one of Chute's propulsive descriptive sentences. It's an exchange between Mickey and Jane: " 'You're poor, aren't you?' He looks at me, right at me. 'You are, too.' 'I am not.' " THAT the class war never starts in these pages, that the desperate poor are left to care for one another and damage one another as they will - all the while, like Jane, often denying their own condition - is Chute's most delicate, devastating touch. You'll find everything you need to know about being at the bottom of American society in that brief conversation between two children. Consider "The School on Heart's Content Road" a message in a bottle: urgent, written in capital letters, determined to travel the seemingly great distance from one shore of reality to another. You might not agree with everything in it, but you might want to open it and read it. She's talking to you. A mythopoetics of the Second Amendment isn't exactly common in modern American literary fiction. Stacey D'Erasmo's third novel, "The Sky Below," will be published in January.
Library Journal Review
In 1995, just after moving to Maine, I sat in a diner eating blueberry pancakes and listening to a conversation in an adjacent booth. I could hear words like militia and mobilizing and heated discussion of the wrongs perpetrated by local and state government and of how to right them. Little did I know that I may have been seated near Rex York and Gordon St. Onge, two main characters in Chute's new novel, which is set in and around a rural, communal/intentional living group known as the Settlement in fictional Egypt, ME. Troubled 15-year-old Mickey Gammon is befriended by local militia leader Rex and then Gordon, the Settlement leader often spoken of as The Prophet. Soon we meet six-year-old Jane Meserve, whose mother is jailed on exaggerated drug charges, and Gordon's multiple wives--including 15 year-old Bree, who mobilizes a march on the Maine State House. Of course, the Feds are always close by, watching the Settlement's growing influence. The first third of this work, Chute's first novel after 1999's critically panned Snow Man, is a welcome return to the mastery of character description and setting that distinguishes her earlier works. But, all too soon, the reader loses faith amid a jumble of diatribe, stereotype, repetition, plot dead ends, and the relentless hero-worship of Gordon St. Onge. Optional. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/08.]--Jenn B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll.-Northeast (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
