The School on Heart's Content Road [Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Carolyn Chute (Author), Susan Ericksen (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2008

Carolyn Chute has been heralded as a passionate voice of the underclass, earning comparisons to William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor. Now, Chute returns to the unforgettable town of Egypt, Maine, and delivers a rousing, politically charged portrait of another group of lives on the margins of our society. The School on Heart’s Content Road begins with the story of Mickey Gammon, a fifteen-year-old dropout who has been evicted from home by his half-brother. Alone, Mickey is introduced to the secretive world of the Settlement and its leader, a man known to many as the “The Prophet.” A rural cooperative in alternative energy, farm produce, and local goods, the Settlement is demonized by the media as a compound of sin, and its true nature remains foreign to outsiders. It is at the Settlement where Mickey’s life collides with that of another deserted child, six-year-old Jane – a cunning, beautiful girl of mixed race, whose mother is in jail on trumped up drug charges. “Secret Agent Jane” prowls the Settlement in her heart-shaped sunglasses, imagining that her childish 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. Vehement and poetic, The School on Heart’s Content Road questions the nature of family, culture, and authority in an intensely diverse nation. It is an urgent plea from those who have been shoved to the fringes of society, but who refuse to be silenced.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Carolyn Chute's sympathetic portrayals of the rural poor evoked comparisons to Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Upton Sinclair. Yet despite her strong main characters and keen insights, critics varied in their reactions: some felt overwhelmed by Chute's pervasive antiestablishment views, while others embraced, or were at least able to overlook, her polemics. Chute's unconventional language, profusion of characters (although she does provide a full character list), and multiple narrators—including the former planet Pluto, God, a crow, and a television set—were not to everyone's taste, either. But readers who don't mind such idiosyncrasies will be rewarded with a rich and vibrant tale, "a love song to a part of America that doesn't have much of a voice" by an "extraordinary, vivid, empathic writer" (New York Times Book Review).
Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio on MP3-CD Lib Ed; Library edition (November 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1423374592
• ISBN-13: 978-1423374596
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Maine, away from the lighthouses and lobsters, January 1, 2009

By 

M. Feldman (Maine, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The School on Heart's Content Road (Hardcover)

"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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Could not hold my attention, December 29, 2008

By 

KBArch "BedtimeReader" (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The School on Heart's Content Road (Hardcover)

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.

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

By 

J. Gunning - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The School on Heart's Content Road (Hardcover)

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.