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Merry Men

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Just as "Ulysses" was derided at it's debut, so has this book been. And just like "Ulysses" is now celebrated as a masterpiece of the millenium, so this book will be. Carolyn Chute, with only four titles in print, is the undisputed heavyweight champeen woman writer of the world. If you love Hemingway's wry just under the surface populism, you will love Chute. In fact, if you only read one book in your life, make it this one!

Carolyn Chute has an amazing talent at bringing to life the very heart and soul of her characters. This book exemplified that ability. Being from the same part of Maine of which she writes, I can identify strongly with these characters. Reading this book thrust me back in time to my youth in Maine---I was overwhelmed with nostalgia simply because Mrs. Chute wrote so well and was able to breathe life into her story. The characters of this novel were Maine personified. Anyone who grew up in Maine can understand what I mean---it wasn't like reading a novel, but rather was like actually being there and experiencing it. Thank you, Carolyn, for treating me to a part of my life I had previously thought forgotten and past.

Carolyn Chute can write, no doubt about that. With rich, spicy, earthy prose she brings to life her rural Maine setting and a whole town full of characters in this third novel.

The setting is the same as for her first two books: Egypt, a small town on the edge of the woods in western Maine, a place where impoverished natives and rich folks "from away" live side by side, but seperate existences.

The characters in this 695-page novel include most of the population, with emphasis on LLoyd Barington, of working-class/farming stock, Forest Johnson, Jr., whose backhoe and 'dozing business employs many of the town's poorest, and Gwen Curry, whose horrid mother proves that money and Connecticut gentility are no proof against cruelty.

The plot, well, here the novel runs into trouble. There is no plot, so to speak. While her characters do cross paths with one another, there is no unifying progression of events- except the slow generalized denigration of a rural way of life. That, it turns out, is Chute's point. "Merry Men" is a documentation of hard times getting harder, of the corporate mindset grinding down the individual.

Not that all her Maine folk are saints, although Lloyd Barrington comes close. Forest Johnson, Jr., for instance, takes advantage of his employees' desperation at every opportunity.

As the book opens, Forest has called out the constable on a bitter winter night. A prank -the fifth in as few days. "Forest, Jr.'s frozen breath bunches and bounces around his face so now there's no face. When his face reappears, it's just this dark sovereignty of eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses and a fierce close shave." Faced with the constable's impotence, Forest vows to lie in wait and kill the merry prankster.

The book then jumps back 30 years, although this is not apparent unless you glance at the top margin of the page. We meet Lloyd Barrington, age 8 3/4, fat, earnest, sensitive, a writer of poetry, a lover of shade trees. This lengthy section is breezy, humorous, affectionate and deeply touching.

Lloyd's mother has died. He lives with his taciturn, incomprehensible father, Edmund, and a houseful of uncles, including Unk Walty, who cooks fabulous meals for them all, unless he's absorbed in one of his papier mache projects, like his masterpiece - lifesized reproductions of all the local women Edmund has slept with, seated around a table dressed in beautiful last-century costumes.

At night Lloyd sneaks out of bed and flits around town in his Super Tree Man costume. "A fat boy by day, maybe so. But tonight and many nights to come, he's a thing of glory." Lloyd plants baby maples. "If they make it, in thirty years, the fat lady's yard will be in deep cool splendorous shade."

Next we meet Gwen Curry on the day her father, Dr. Curry, has died. Gwen is a fearful, lonely child, her mind flickering between the awful events following her father's death and jagged memories of her short life with Phoebe, her mother. Every night Phoebe sings under the grate to Gwen's bedroom. A few times her father had remonstrated. "So Phoebe sang louder. Show tunes. Pop tunes. Rock and Roll. Television jingles. And once a shattery tinkling splat! A glass thrown into the sink."

Chute's portrait of manic cruelty and bewildered child is heart rending. Yet when Grandma packs them off to Connecticutt that's the last we see of Gwen for hundreds of pages.

In between there are numerous vignettes - Forest Johnson, Jr., fires an illiterate man and Forest's dissolute son returns from California bringing a grandson who's soon embroiled in family strife. The Soules, Lloyd's wife's people, lose their family farm to the bank. A young Soule falls in love with a middle-aged cousin of Lloyd's, a man on parole, suffering from clinical depression. They marry and as the husband loses his job, she becomes pregnant. Many of these stories end badly; some Chute simply abandons. Each absorbs the reader; none are fully resolved.

Finally Gwen Curry comes back, a rich, very rich, widow of an industrialist, a symbol of all the things gone wrong in Egypt. Her attaction to Lloyd, educated former hippie, man of all work, crusader, prankster, is instant. He is more ambivalent.

How Chute resolves this final conflict adds to the reader's frustration. Such magnificent writing, so often leading nowhere. And towards the end, Chute cannot resist long preachy passages explaining what's wrong with America even though she just spent 500 pages showing us. But Chute is worth reading for the breadth and beauty of her language and characters - even if you turn the last page and throw the book across the room.

Chute's cyclonic novel absolutely captivated me and revealed a world within the state in which I live, but one that will always exist outside of mine as an "outer-stater". The characters, their struggles and disappointments were utterly realized. However, I have a problem with Lloyd's final "Robin Hood" act. For nearly 700 pages, Chute gave us an utterly endearing and sensitive character in Lloyd Barrington, one who NEVER hurt anyone and only acted against faceless corporations. For him to act so contrary to that nature was unfounded, no matter the economic status of an individual. Any feedback?

Makes _The Beans_ seem like a primer -- and I like _Beans_. The characters move in and out of our view like players in an Altman movie; as I am sad to leave one scene, so I am delighted by whoever shows up next. I think the ending is somewhat contrived and untrue to (at least my own version of) the protagonist, but that's a matter for discussion; other minds might differ. Shall we talk?

Living in a small Maine town, I can attest to the veracity of Chute's vision. The characters are well-realized. Many scenes are breath-takingly well-written. Two problems with the novel: (1) It would be better without Chute's sermons about the grotesque evils of hunting & corporate America. (2) It would be a great novel with a different ending. The final act of the protagonist, Lloyd Barrington, is uncharacteristically & gratuitously cruel. That Chute had to change her protagonist's personality shows that she did not know how to end this wonderful, sprawling novel.

This book is not comfortable reading. Its canvas is tiny (and familiar, if you've read Chute's other novels)---the small rural Maine town she calls "Egypt." Despite the smallness of the place, the scope of "Merry Men" is sprawling. Like a Russian novel, it has a list of characters at the beginning, although, as Chute says, " . . . only a few characters are central. The rest are walk-ons, like the people you see only to say `Hi' to in the P.O. . . . Please do not struggle to keep everyone straight." Given the ongoing constriction of the postal service since the book's publication in 1994, bumping into one's neighbors at the post office is hardly likely, but Chute's advice is good. Find some time when you get into a novel of this length and give yourself up to it.

Chute's style demands that you pay attention. Characters appear and then disappear for long periods of time. Conflicts may be resolved, or not. Characters from her other books show up, and you feel, "Ah, I know you from somewhere," as if they were real people. In a sense, they are. With the surnames one encounters just about anywhere in Maine--Plummer, Moody, Soule, Cole, Plummer, and Bean --they populate Egypt in such human variety that they create their own complete world. One of the protagonists, Lloyd Barrington, goes off to get an education but ends up back in Egypt; any small town has someone like him. Aneeka DiBias, another protagonist, leads a local protest against the excesses of the hunting culture that thrives in Egypt; the story is based on actual Maine hunting accident that killed a woman in her backyard. Forest Johnson, also a central character, is as perfect a depiction of a small town road commissioner as you'll ever see. There is a whole gallery of quirky oddballs: Unk Walty, with his gift for creating papier-mache likenesses of real people, to macabre effect; David Moody, the minister turned philosophical well driller; David Turnbull--the biker creaking with leather, with a creepy dog named King in his lap; Carroll Plummer, the alcoholic whose second chance at a happy life is so heartbreakingly destroyed.

The characters in "Merry Men" don't mean much to anyone beyond Egypt. Someone loses his family farm to the bank, someone else ends up living in a car camper. A couple loses their first child because the hospital is reluctant to treat the wife and they have (surprise!) no health insurance. Jobs with logging operations pay, until the companies leave, having despoiled the landscape.

These kinds of characters, along with their precarious economic situations, don't mean much to some readers, either. See Ann Hulbert's contemptuous review in the New York Times when the book was published. She practically wore out her thesaurus with words like "hicks," "rustic," "cramped," "provincial," "primitive," "grotesque," and "yokel." No doubt a novel that examined a cross-section of a New York City block in all ITS minute detail would be, by contrast, fascinatingly cosmopolitan. Hulbert, writing in 1994, noted contemptuously that the novel has "an air of stale populist propaganda" because its characters suffer at the hands of indifferent corporations, banks, agribusiness, hospitals, and schools. Today, the novel seems downright prescient. Near its close, one of the "rustics" offers a bleak view of the future: "'everyone will be entirely dependent on big business, and entirely created in the image of big business. Many will fail the competitive part, but they'll certainly be dependent. They will not make the grade at the fast and funny new hi-tech life. They will fall by the wayside. But there will be a place for those kind! The military. The prisons. And executions like you never saw before.'" Sometimes a novel can open up a world you don't live in, the better to see the one in which you do.
M. Feldman

This is a great book in "The Great Books" sense of the word. It's rich and full and, amazing things seem to happen on every page. Take Rembrandt and Velasquez and Dickens and Tolstoy and have them create a portrait of Western Maine. That will give some idea of what this book like.

Mrs. Chute, however, is very upset that people cannot be farmers the way they were in the Nineteenth Century. Mrs. Chute is a brilliant writer but she is angry.

Whether or not you agree with Mrs. Chute's politics everyone needs to read this book. I am shocked to find it out of print. Mrs. Chute is one of the Best Writers that ever Walked the Face of Earth.