Customer Reviews

Letourneau's Used Auto Parts

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Carolyn Chute's manipulation of the English language alone warrants her place at the forefront of America's writers today. In Letourneau's Used Auto Parts, Chute continues to tell the story of the very poor of western Maine. This book, even more than The Beans truly evokes the world of the poor, the desperate, and the struggling; as well as their small but important joys and victories. This book truly opened my eyes to what is important in life.

Mrs. Chute has done something eternal. It's as though she has carved the Pieta with a chain saw; a Pieta far more moving, poignant and beautiful than Michelangelo's. Society is only a precarious charade against chaos. Your fine manners and social skills aside; we are these people and always have been.

I guess you can include me in the list of unwashed heathens who didn't think this book was a work of literary genius. I found the non-exploits of the Letourneaus and the Babbidges to be beyond boring, and I could not force myself to finish.

Carolyn Chute is basically an effortless genious. I loved the imagery of the trailers in the woods with their homey curtains. Thank you, Carolyn.

This is a highly amusing cacaphony of Maine voices. Crowe Bovery's hands are tatooed with auto grease. He has spent three days with the college kid, Jill Luce. He shows up at the house of his boss. The boss's wife doesn't know Crowe has just lost his wife and children in a fire. Crowe smells like a motor running hot. Lillian Greenlaw is an ex-girl friend of Big Lucien Letourneau, Crowe's boss. Lillian Greenlaw is the second wife of E. Blackstone Babbidge.

Big Lucien has a reputation as a man of gold. At Miracle City Big Lucien lets in trailers. The leaders of the town are concerned the place will turn into a slum. Big Lucien's wife is so pregnant she doesn't attend a tupperware party. An old hippy, former wife of Big Lucien, visits. Hippies have big city accents, great hair, and love the outdoors. There used to be hippies on the property living in tents. Big Lucien's present wife's name is Keezhia. One of his former wives, Maxine, mother of Little Lucien among others, lives in Miracle City, too. Maxine works at the mill.

Patty and Armand Letourneau have a son, Severin. Patty works at a bar called the Cold Spot. People are ordered away from Miracle City. They are in violation of a new code. The back cover describes Carolyn Chute as a literary Diane Arbus. I second the characterization.

"Maxine is alone eating eggs. She has her favorite tape on low, the voice of Waylon Jennings just humming. She swings one cowboy boot in hard happy circles. 'Mmmmmmmmm,' she hums along." This a "manipulation of the English language" that should guarantee Carolyn Chute a position in the forefront of literary achievement? I think not. Her affected unpretentiousness in presenting her downbeat characters in economically wrecked western Maine is excruciatingly boring reading. The self-consciously folksy style brings the Letourneaus and the Babbidge's off as a crew of loutish oafs who, like the characters in "Tobacco Road," sit around in their shacks, crowded with wives, husbands, ex-wives, step-children, half-sisters and -brothers, cousins, uncles, doing almost nothing except occasionally shooting each other's guard dogs and lamenting the depreciation of land value. It's labor trying to plough through a narrative in which nothing happens and most details seem random and aimless.

The characters are all really depressing and it is another one of those styles in which improper grammar and a lack of literacy is used all throughout it. It was the style that goes along the lines of, "It was the store. I stood there. I saw. 'Hey watcha don' thwat ah thing fer?' He sputtered."

I don't recommend it.