I’ve really been enjoying this book by Carolyn Chute her first, because of its character-driven plot, its simple yet shocking story of a family in backwoods Maine, but admittedly it’s the writing style that’s gotten me hooked. There were many times I wanted to post on a particular phrase or paragraph but I just couldn’t get past this one without sharing it:
Cole Deveau’s bride loves a straight-back chair. Her knitting lies black on her knee like a sleeping cat. She wears a flowered apron, the kind that goes over the head. It is dark out now but she doesn’t need a light to knit by. She is just a pair of pale hands and number-three needles, a gray face in moonlight. (p. 110)
There’s simile and there’s simple imagery. There’s metaphor: “a pair of pale hands and number-three needles” that tells us what kind of woman she is as she lets a repetive, natural action take over her life so that she doesn’t have to think. It is a conscious decision as we’re told she “loves a straight-back chair.” And why is she up and knitting, “a gray face in moonlight.” Chute goes on:
She sits by the window where she can look out, waiting. Her eyes look straight into the yard, somewhat turned in on themselves like the eyes of the dead. Her lips move, counting stitches. But otherwise she is like a big doll, unrelenting perfect posture. But no one comes. The moon lifts clear of Cole’s caved-in barn…feeble, shaky.
Wow. Such simple writing, factual yet full of observation and detail.
The story here moves quickly and it is mainly through the focus on characters and their dialogue that we get a picture of poverty and families just scraping by. There is incest–even though there’ a tv–and it’s not just the Bean family that indulges in this small comfort that makes their lives easier. The book opens with the first person account of Earlene, a young girl who lives across a right-of-way from the Bean tribe, and Chute has chosen to jump right in at the begininning of the story with Earlene’s grandmother coming to visit and finding Earlene in bed with her father. We aren’t told what happens, but there is the obvious inappropriateness (Earlene’s likely around ten) and the more obvious loneliness of Earlene’s father since his wife’s been institutionalized.
It’s a totally absorbing story, seeing human nature at its most basic where survival, comfort, and love are the values that are sought above any other ambitions.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology