Carolyn Chute, The School on Heart's Content Road. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008, 352 pages, $24.00.
After a nearly ten-year hiatus, Maine novelist Carolyn Chute is back, and is she ever, with her fifth, by far her best, and most provocative novel, The School on Heart's Content Road.. This politically supercharged book is dynamite. Even the politically correct New York Times Book Review got it. Reviewer Stacey D'Erasmo described Chute's new novel as "a love song to a voiceless part of America" which is "as idiosyncratic as it is engaging."
So taken was D'Erasmo by Chute's depiction of the downtrodden and the disenfranchised that she neglected to mention the punch line of the book, namely, the call by the book's hero for Maine to secede from the American Empire.
Carolyn Chute burst onto the literary scene from backwoods Maine in 1985 with the publication of her widely acclaimed book The Beans of Egypt, Maine. The book sold over 350,000 copies and was followed by Letourneau's Used Auto Parts, Merry Men, and Snow Man. Chute paid dearly for her politically incorrect attempt to humanize a Maine militia man in Snow Man. The New York literary set would have no part of it.
Ironically, Chute's latest novel is also about two competing militias, the right-wing Border Mountain Militia and the left-wing True Maine Militia. If the truth be known, The School on Heart's Content Road is a fictional account of life in the 450-member 2nd Maine Militia, of which Chute is co-founder and secretary.
Carolyn and her husband, Michael, are ardent supporters of the constitutional right to bear arms. Michael is the town of Parsonsfields' pensive graveyard man, who sports a spiffy two-foot long beard and a green-felt crusher hat.
Even though I have never owned a gun, and have no plans to do so, I have attended several meetings of the 2nd Maine Militia (2MM) over the past ten years. After attending my first such meeting I realized that I was probably the only man there not carrying a concealed weapon. At Carolyn's place you are just as likely to meet a right-wing patriot as you are an African American communist poet from Boston.
The 61-year-old grandmother often appears at militia meetings carrying her AK-47 or SKS assault rifle on a shoulder strap, wearing a camo jacket, a colorful kerchief, work boots, and military sunglasses. The return address on all correspondence from Carolyn reads "No Fax/No Phone/No Paved Road." To which she might also add, "No Computer."
Before rushing to judgment about Carolyn and the 2MM, one should take a much closer look. The role of the 2MM is similar to that of hundreds of small shooting clubs scattered throughout Switzerland, one of the most heavily armed but peaceful nations in the world. Above all, the 2MM is a social organization of men and women who use target shooting as a means of coping with feelings of separation, alienation, meaninglessness, and powerlessness engendered by our government and Corporate America.
Carolyn often refers to the 2MM as a "no-wing" militia. It is an ideologically diverse group of working-class people living all over Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. It includes Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Lefties, libertarians, feminists, patriots and anarchists. They all share an extreme distrust of the Fortune 500, Wall Street, the U.S. government, the United Nations, and most other large organizations.
When they gather to target shoot, members of the 2MM also talk much about life in Maine and how it has changed. They bemoan Maine's loss of political will, civil liberties, economic security, collective memory, traditional culture, and sense of community. They recoil at the dehumanized, mass-production, mass-marketing, mass-consumption, narcissistic lifestyle that pervades most of America. Some are fed up with consumerism, technomania, megalomania, robotism, globalization, and American imperialism.
Many just want to be left alone. But an increasing number of them, including Carolyn Chute, want out of the United States. Carolyn is a member of the advisory board of the Second Vermont Republic, a Vermont secession group committed to the peaceful return of Vermont to its status as an independent republic as it once was.
Unlike most conservatives, Carolyn hates big corporations. Unlike most liberals, she scorns big government. She identifies with and supports the disadvantaged, the downtrodden, and those whose lives have been made miserable by big business and big government.
The story underlying The School on Heart's Content Road, told, in part, through the eyes of fifteen-year-old dropout, Mickey Gannon, and six-year-old Jane. Mickey, who has been evicted from his home, is taken in by Rex York, Captain of the Border Mountain Militia. Rex introduces Mickey to the secretive world of the Settlement, a rural cooperative into alternative energy, farm produce, and locally made goods. The Settlement is run by Gordon St. Onge, known by many as "The Prophet." Because St. Onge has so many wives, the Settlement has been demonized by the media as a "compound of sin." In reality, the Settlement is a metaphor for the school of life.
Jane, on the other hand, is a cunning, beautiful girl of mixed-race, whose mother is in jail on trumped up drug charges. "Secret Agent" Jane prowls the Settlement in her heart-shaped sunglasses, imagining that her childish plans to bring down the community will reunite her with her mother.
The lives of Mickey and Jane intersect at the Settlement. As they struggle to adjust to their new, complex surrogate family, Mickey and Jane witness the mounting unrest within the Settlement's ranks between the two rival militias. Tension builds to a shocking and devastating crescendo. Meltdown!
Although Carolyn Chute is quite shy, some have compared her to Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, French anti-globalization activist Josá Bová, and nineteenth century labor leader Mother Jones. All hail the Mother of Maine, who just might one day become the Mother of North American Secession.
Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
December 1, 2008
