Finished this a few days back but haven’t really been feeling up to heavy insight. Loved the book; it’s likely taken a place among the top twenty in my estimation.
Through dialogue and characterization, we get a pretty detailed view of what life is all about for two families in the backwoods area of Maine. Carolyn Chute cleverly switches points of view from the first person of Earlene to an omniscient third unknown narrator to give us a perspective on what Earlene sees and feels, and then what she cannot know but will become a part of–that is, the Bean family across the right-of-way driveway.
Chute is sparse yet clear with her imagery; mentioning a few items such as tires, toys, a bicycle in the yard of the Bean’s trailer home gives us the picture of neglect and lack of pride. There is a television, and maybe that’s how the Beans keep in touch with the world though it seems that soap operas rule the daytime viewing. Funny, their own situation of moving between lovers and outright incestuous relationships make the soaps seems quite tame in comparison.
The sex has a different aspect, however. It is not love-driven, but sought out of physical need by the men and accepted by the women as they pop out baby after baby to make their own lives useful and entertaining. Earlene, living alone with her father in a respectable ranch house that he’d built is not free from the possibility–we’re never completely sure of consummation–of relations with her father. It’s clear, however, that they are closer in intimate ways than most father-daughter relationships deem proper. The man Earlene marries, and who she’s watched grow up, is Beal Bean, who is responsible for at least half of the babies his Aunt Roberta has produced.
The sexual inbreeding is, as we know, potentially dangerous to the family line. It may be seen as well as a metaphor for a losing way of life. Reuben Bean, a hellraiser and gross sort who is carted off to prison for beating a sheriff when Earlene is still preteen, ends up living with him when he returns since it is his own house that his commonlaw wife has abandoned to marry another man. Chute beautifully ties up the ending with a single statement from Earlene: “Reuben, you are goin ta burn in hell!” Since Chute has prefaced this with “In a fadin whisper, I say…” from Earlene, the reader is left to imagine for himself whether Earlene is once again going to give in to her circumstances.
It’s a wonderfully funny and poignantly sad book about a worrisome reality. It’s not taken from a bygone era; there are families living like this today, barely scraping by. But the Beans are actually luckier than many others who don’t have meat to hunt, televisions to watch, people to interact with (and that would include sexual promiscuity as communication and comfort) or roofs of any sort over their head. So while it may be touted as a book about extreme poverty I did not take it as such but rather as insight into an insulated society.
The writing style and language is well done; though others may consider it too simple, I found Chute to be naturally aware of the element of character building and how observations and manner of voicing those observations gives us story. Most sentence structure was brief and to the point, factual and that emphasized the sparsity of the environment. I most certainly will add another Chute book to my list to read.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology