Big Lucien and the Knights of Junk : LETOURNEAU’S USED AUTO PARTS<i> by Carolyn Chute (Ticknor & Fields: $16.95; 244 pp.) </i>

They live in flimsy plywood cabins or broken-down trailers; their dinners are stacks of fried baloney or half a dozen hot dogs splashed with violent yellow mustard; their thick wrists are permanently blackened with engine grease. They fall asleep at the kitchen table, the bills of their plastic baseball-type caps turned straight up; and around their feet, a slew of children assortedly begotten out to the verge of incest, or at least forgetfulness.

They are the men in Carolyn Chute’s decrepit backwoods hamlet of Egypt, Me. They are hicks, yokels, rednecks, with streaks of violence, touches of monstrosity and three-day beards. At first glance, they seem to be northeast versions of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Roaders.

Only at first glance. In “The Beans of Egypt Maine” and in her new novel, “Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts,” Chute has created a rural antiworld, crude and deprived, of an eccentricity that can seem close to madness, and with a total disregard of our currently conventional aesthetics of living.

It is a nightmare place or, more exactly, it would seem like a nightmare to a visitor. But Chute is not taking us on a visit.

Fiction has this over life: Where a material antiworld and ours would mutually destruct, a fictional antiworld can enrich, teaching us ourselves through strangeness. In “Letourneau,” we begin with monsters and a myth and then, as our sensibility becomes acclimatized, these shrink into their humanity, and we feel a new tug on our own.

“Letourneau” is set in the Maine, not of lobsters and sea captains, but of rusty front-yard car wrecks and few jobs. The men saw timber in New Hampshire, a few miles away, each in his own cloud of heat and black flies. The more settled and privileged have jobs in Egypt’s only real industry: The automobile junkyard owned by Big Lucien Letourneau.

Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts--the words are emblazoned in gold thread on the scruffy green work shirts that the men wear wherever they go. It stands for more than a living; it stands for the only possible living, just as the land did in the Middle Ages.

It is, in fact, a medieval blazon. It seems to signify a fellowship, a magical kingdom, a Camelot of spongy white bread and margarine. Those who wear it on their backs appear, initially, as powerful, dangerous, and as flecked with strangeness as a Round Table Knight crossing a dragon-haunted moor.

Holding it altogether--or seeming to--is the myth-like Big Lucien. All we get of him until the very end is the toe of his boot, at one point; at another, a few words spoken through a screen door. But he rules--or seems to--by economics, by force, but most of all by an odd code of sweetness that lets it be known, somehow, that animals are to be well treated, and that there will always be shelter for those who need it. His decrepit trailer park is inhabited rent-free; and in a household that teems with brothers, nephews, aunts and the offspring of half a dozen current and former wives and lovers, there are always four or five derelict old women.

“The Man of Gold,” a former wife calls him. Every world needs its governing myth, just as every world needs its axis. Even if it turns out that an axis is not a thing or a force, but a kind of confluence of other things and other forces. At the end of “Letourneau’s” tales of backwoods passions, struggles, lives and deaths, we finally encounter Big Lucien in person. He is an insignificant little man, with hunched shoulders and thinning hair. He is standing on a Portland street corner, waiting for a lift home after one of his periodic and ignominious arrests for public drunkenness. He has shrunk. And so have the other characters in “Letourneau,” whom we meet, at first, in an outsizing light.

There is Blackstone, a grim fundamentalist patriarch with a forearm so hairy that the moon tattooed on it seems to be “lost in a storm.” He regularly plays an Easter video showing the Crucifixion in gory detail and forces his children to watch. “Is He dead yet?” one small boy asks his brother. “No, I seen one small breath,” the other replies.

Blackstone is terrifying. But he marries a flirtatious second wife; she begins to wear old-woman clothes and read the Bible out of demoralization. He beats his favorite daughter mercilessly. Yet when she runs away, instead of raging, he throws up from wretchedness. When a son defies him, he asks the boy, mildly, to simmer down. He has shrunk into the humanly complex and indefinite.

Julie, his stepdaughter, starts off with a comical bang. She is bent on making money. She sells birch logs to tourists at $5 each; she tells people’s “futures” for $1. When her mother sees her keeping company with an older man, and gives her a supply of condoms, she sells them to her classmates. Right away, she asks for a dozen more. “He must be a regular rooster,” the mother declares. Chute’s world contains comedy along with pain, deprivation and longing.

Julie, larger than life, seduces Blackstone. Pregnant, she grows larger than two lives. And then, married to Crowe Bovey, she shrinks too--into a longing for a tidy kitchen, and “tea with a dot of milk in it.”

As Chute’s characters reduce from myth to humanity, some grow indistinct. Others--for example, a former hippie wife of Big Lucien’s who has an affair with another wife’s son--never do possess much distinctness.

The author sometimes strains for effect as she forges links between the grotesque and the natural in her backwoods’ world. It seems unnecessary, for instance, to call a nighttime rainstorm “ghoulish.”

But “Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts” is a wise, moving and often funny book. It stops us as we whiz by one corner of America’s just-off-the-road wilderness. It shows us the life there. It lowers our speed limit to the pace of reflection and self-reflection.