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School On Heart's Content Road, The (2008)

by Carolyn Chute(Favorite Author)

3.08 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

1423374568 (ISBN13: 9781423374565)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Brilliance Audio

series

Heart's Content

review 1: I loved this book...but that didn't come as a surprise. I've read all of Chute's novels and while I adored this one, it was a little different to the others. Maybe it has more in common with her _Snowman_ novel...it's political and hard hitting, but it delivers its message using the characters who live in Egypt, Maine. It's brilliantly written and rather than using chapters as defining units, she instead uses icons with each icon often heralding in a new voice. I so hope that Chute is still writing. I can't quite get my head around there being no more books of hers for me to read.
review 2: This is the fourth book in a series of loosely connected novels that charts the lives of several families over several generations in and around Egypt, Maine. (I think Egy... morept Maine is a fictional town, but it reminds me a great deal of Mexico, Maine, which, for folks who haven't travelled that far down US Rt 2, is a small papermill town in the southern interior of Maine). Ms. Chute writes about what she is familiar with- the intense insularity of rural poverty, the inarticulate passions (love, frustration, thwarted pride, anger, desperation, bravado) of people who are denied avenues for security, expression, and above all the attempts of families to stay together in the face of larger forces that tear them apart, the beauty of the natural world, the devestation Ms. Chute is an avowed critic of capitalism, consumerism, Federal intervention, and her political ideals play into her novels, but her novels are not political. They are much too raw, too immediate, to be considered political treatises. Reading Mrs. Chute's work was a revelation to me: it was the experience of reading in print the narrative of lives who I have known during my time living and working in rural Maine and Appalacia, lives which often times do not find expression in words. Mrs. Chute's ear for the language of rural Mainers, and for their concerns, and for their internal worlds, is amazing. She is sympathetic to her characters, but she is unsparing- her characters do terrible things, and she is not an apologist for those terrible things- the consequences of their actions take up as much space as the motivations which drive the characters, and that is a rare fairness. So, that's a general backdrop to her ouvre. In this novel, which is probably not her best work, but which is my personal favorite, Carolyn Chute explores a group of seperatists who attempt to create their own community in the backwoods of rural maine, and the various forces (government drug laws, rightest talk show hosts, leftest professors, internal squabbles, etc) which make that kind of purist undertaking heartbreakingly impossible. All of Mrs. Chute's work deals with compromise; in this novel, compromise is the one thing you most want these characters to not have to succomb to.At the same time, she explores the dynamics between the various relationships- the charismatic leader, a bear of a man, college educated, deeply emotional, trying to be the head of a sprawling family, his multiple wives and lovers (this part of the book I found to be both intriguing and deeply challenging), the children of the community, some who hew strongly to their identity as radicals, others who rebel against it, trying to find their own paths, the tensions between different seperatists groups who share only the intense suspicion of the federal government.Sprinkled through out this story are also the perspective of: the television set, various reporters, aliens from space, a pair of heart shaped sunglasses, and God. So there is also that to contend with, if you read this book.Somehow, however, Ms. Chute pulls it all off, even the dispatches from aliens. You get the sense that she isn't trying to convince you of a pat world view, but rather plea for the dignity of people whose world views are ellipsical and bizarre- flat out kooky, in fact- but internall consistent with the mad world that they are forced to move within. less

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