Just as I suspected, this is the author whose latest book I read about in the New York Times book review a couple of months ago and thought, yuck. (Here's the link to the review http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/books/04chut.html) For a woman who has no electricity and is married to an illiterate, she obviously does not have her own website.
Let me say it again about these Beans, yuck. Chute has chosen to continue a life of rural impoverishment, and like her characters, does not display any economic or interpersonal motivation to improve. Now into her fifth book, I wonder what she does with her royalties ... certainly not spend them on frivolities, let alone basics like central heating.
But holding to my pledge to assess the states according to my reading goals: the book does not come across as uniquely Maine. Ignoring a throw-away reference to fiddle heads in the woods, the location could just as easily be Appalachia or the pine woods of Georgia. The characters, other than an occasional "a-yuh," do not sound like "Maine-iacs." They are maniacs -- religious fanatics, ex-cons or soon to be cons, sex fiends, bullies.
There is no sense of history or future to the story line. Chute intentionally depicts a life of cyclical abuse, unemployment, and alienation. Characters appear and disappear without purpose or explanation, a device that is used to show how little understanding or curiosity Earlene has about her life and its place in Egypt. Everyone seems expendable and interchangeable.
I don't necessarily want to be uplifted by everything I read and I am not addicted to happy endings or morals in a story. It is Chute's choice to live like this, to write about this kind of marginal existence. But like the sign both she and her fictional Pomerleaus put in their driveway to keep out strangers, I would willingly not enter her "plot" again.
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