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The poverty that poisons the soul

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Reynolds is a Times staff writer.

The School on Heart’s Content Road

A Novel

Carolyn Chute

Atlantic Monthly Press: 384 pp., $24

So much begins with poverty. Here in the land of literature, we forget that sometimes. Carolyn Chute, beginning with her first novel 23 years ago, “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” and now, with “The School on Heart’s Content Road,” the first in a projected five-novel series, pushes it in our faces. Chute is not in the mincing-words business. She is not in the marketing business. She is in the writing business. When democracy allows (even causes) senseless and terrible things to happen to poor people; when institutions (corporations, bureaucracies) take away people’s dignity as well as their property and their ability to care for their children, there are consequences. Children are deformed -- emotionally and physically -- by suffering. They seek refuge wherever they can find it -- places to get their needs met. Adults are deformed by suffering and injustice. They can become heartless, even dangerous. So this is a terrifying book. Because, as in the case of poor Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, we helped to create this world.

“The School on Heart’s Content Road” is set in Egypt, Maine, in 2000. It begins and ends with a 15-year-old boy named Mickey Gammon, crushed by the public school system (body and soul) and seeking refuge from the grinding poverty of his half-brother’s house. In that house, a 4-year-old child is dying of cancer without pain medication because his parents cannot afford pain medication. Social workers and their myriad forms are no good whatsoever. Mickey does odd jobs for the local militia, a far-right group of 400 Bible-based patriots run by a man named Rex.

There is another group in town. The Settlement is a far-left group of people living on 900 acres and led by Gordon St. Onge, whom some call “the prophet.” He is polygamous. The Settlement members home-school their children, grow their own food, make their own clothes, generate their own energy (from wind) and live off the great grid in every sense of the term. Gordon has taken in a 6 1/2 -year-old girl named Jane whose mother has recently been arrested for drug possession. Jane, young as she is, has been encouraged by local narcs and FBI agents (nice men with candy) to rat on her mother and other members of the Settlement (especially Gordon). A neighbor is always ready with a tape recorder to document her stories.

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This book is at least partially autobiographical, as Chute recently told the New York Times. In the mid-1990s, Chute started a group called the 2nd Maine Militia (also called Your Wicked Good Militia), which meets in the woods behind her house in rural Maine.

Chute told the Times that they were a “no-wing organization,” “very right, very left and very shy.” They believe in the right to bear arms (Chute keeps an AK-47 in her living room) and condemn the influence of big business in American political life. At least one incident in the novel, when Settlement children protest big business in the state capitol carrying kazoos, actually happened in 1996.

So here’s Rex and Gordon, right and left, old friends who agree that this modern life no longer suits human nature. They also agree that democracy in America veers perilously close to fascism from time to time. One believes in secession, the other in power, in self-defense. (In the end, their relationship is ruined by a silly teenage girl who doesn’t understand or respect her own power.) Then there are the children: Mickey, seeking refuge with the militia, living in a treehouse in the woods; and Jane, seeking refuge with the Settlement, a pawn of the government in her little star-shaped dark glasses, “Secret Agent Jane.” Something’s gotta give.

Carolyn Chute is 61. She is poor (contrary to popular belief, writing a literary novel, even a bestseller, rarely makes you rich or even middle class), living in an unheated house with no running water and an outhouse.

Her writing is raw and strong and vivid, with deep resounding echoes of Faulkner and Upton Sinclair. Rain doesn’t just fall; it comes “smashing down.” A dying child’s “evaporated monkey-small face turns slowly to the left, toward his father, because he can smell his father, that smell of the great chain store, of its chemically treated fabrics and acres of stock, oceans of stock, with that tidal-wavelike come-and-go-rhythm of stock moving, on sale, big sale, big specials, big buys, the universe of all necessity and heart’s content there on display.”

The book is written in various voices; screen voices (television and screenplay style) that are always screeching, filled with exclamation marks: “Militias are BAD! Militias are SCARY!” or “Be afraid. Poor people are lazy and immoral, and violence is on their fingertips for some reason” or “Ooooh! . . . aren’t yooooo just yearning for a brand neeeewww TV . . . one of the big ones like everyone else hazzzz.” Some entries are in the voice of a crow, looking down on the local landscape and the entire nation. Many are in the voices of the children.

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Chute doesn’t care whether you feel preached at, shouted at, frightened or incriminated. She’s too busy getting the voices right, living the lives of her characters. She’s a scientist, brilliant and mad, lighting matches under beakers, mixing compounds, breaking words into their smallest divisible parts. It doesn’t boil down to politics, this novel. It boils down to humans, who fail to obey even the simplest, clearest laws of thermodynamics, physics, gravity or even chaos theory.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com

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