13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Maine, away from the lighthouses and lobsters, January 1, 2009
"The School on Heart's Content Road," Carolyn Chute's fifth novel, is set, like her first novel ("The Beans of Egypt, Maine") in the kind of small, rural inland community that can be found just about anywhere in Maine. It is a Maine mostly unknown to the summer tourists who populate the coast. Chute's Egypt, modeled loosely on a small western Maine town like Parsonsfield or Porter (the area where she lives with her husband), has an IGA supermarket, not a giant Hannaford's or Shaw's, and its back roads contain an assortment of decaying farmsteads, tidy ranch houses, and mobile homes.
In this setting Chute places a utopian community, the Settlement, headed by the charismatic Gordon St. Onge, a man whose frailties and relationships bring to mind other American experiments in communal living: Brook Farm, Oneida, New Harmony. The Settlement is home to a range of vividly drawn characters, including "Secret Agent Jane," a child who has lost her mother to prison, and Mickey Gammon, a 15 year old homeless boy who lives in a tree and is drawn to two competing militias, the Border Mountain Militia and the True Maine militia, the first run by angry men, the second by a group of idealistic Settlement teenagers. Chute's narrative voice in "The School on Heart's Content Road" is an omniscient one, with little symbols (a crow, a cloud, a TV set and so on) marking each voice, a device that seems at first like an affectation but grows on you. Through these voices, with affection, anger, and despair, she depicts the face of rural Maine poverty and the grinding forces ("corporatism" is a word she uses a lot) that make it impossible for ordinary people to live decent lives.
This novel is more furious and more polemical than "The Beans of Egypt, Maine," but it is also more lyrical in its evocation of the weedy green summer lushness of the western Maine hills and of the people who live there. Chute has the author's equivalent of perfect pitch for the way her Maine characters look and sound, including the French-accented speech one still encounters just about anywhere. I know that Chute is sometimes compared to Faulkner, but there is no landed gentry in her part of the world, no Sartoris looking backward, no Snopes on the make. Instead, there is just Egypt, a little community that has always been a bit of a backwater, and its utopian, rather 19th century reinvention in the form of the self-sufficient Settlement on Heart's Content Road, where the inhabitants experiment with solar and wind energy, tap the maple trees, take in every lost soul, and fend off reporters looking for a sensational story to lead the evening news. Chute's voice is deeply, truly a Maine one, but the residents of Egypt, mostly overlooked except when when it is useful to exploit them, could be living just about anywhere in America.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Could not hold my attention, December 29, 2008
This was my first Carolyn Chute novel. The characters were wonderfully drawn. I appreciated how Ms. Chute was able to work with the unusual structure of giving multiple characters (even a crow) the opportunity to assume various parts of the narrative. I loved the idiosyncrasies of the people. They were totally believeable and often intriguing. The writing was dazzling at times. Ms. Chute knows how to deliver convincing dialogue and how to describe people, objects and places in a fresh way. So what's not to like and why did I give this only two stars? The storyline (what there was) just did not engage me. I couldn't feel any tension building; it was all of one texture. Once I got half way through the book, I couldn't wait to be done with it. The author mentions in the postscript that she has four more novels written about the same setting (a rural citizens' militia and a cult-like rural commune). I would have been happy with a tighter plot or shorter book.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best writers that ever walked the face of Earth, April 29, 2009
Mrs. Chute is one of the best writers that ever walked the face of Earth. 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. I don't agree with her politics and she doesn't agree with mine. I hope she doesn't mind if I think she has written one of the greatest series of books ever.
Whether or not you agree with Mrs. Chute's politics everyone needs to read all of her books.
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