Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 7, 1994 TAG: 9404070291
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ELIZABETH EDWARDSEN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: PARSONSFIELD, MAINE LENGTH: Medium
It's a subject Chute knows well. Before selling her first novel, ``The Beans of Egypt, Maine,'' Chute lived the hard life of rural poverty.
And while her literary success has brought some comforts and fame, including a semester as writer-in-residence at Hollins College in 1993, Chute hasn't forgotten what it's like to receive welfare or hold low-paying jobs.
Her newest book, ``Merry Men,'' continues the saga of Egypt, Maine, a fictional town where farm equipment and old cars sit outside homes and where yuppies moving to the country stir resentment.
Egypt shares the fate of countless small towns buffeted by recession: The mill shuts down; a home is lost to taxes; the hospital withholds care to those who can't pay; people lose their rural birthright, their land.
``It's the thing that I lay awake about, morning, noon and night. I just think of this all the time, how our culture is creating masses and masses of useless people, landless people,'' Chute said recently.
``What we've created now is a different kind of poverty. They can't grow their own food, they can't make their own tools, they can't make their own clothes, they can't do anything.''
This new rural poverty and the people it breeds are portrayed in ``Merry Men,'' Chute's most ambitious and most political book yet. Seething with class animus, it creates the specter of a nightmarish future of life dominated by giant corporations and spoiled by modern education.
Like her earlier books - ``The Beans of Egypt, Maine'' was followed by ``Letourneau's Used Auto Parts'' - ``Merry Men'' develops more from its vivid characters than from a plot. The principal figures include:
Lloyd Barrington, who grows from an overweight 8-year-old poetry-scrawling boy who sneaks out at night to plant saplings around Egypt to a college-educated misfit and hometown Robin Hood, stealing from yuppies to help his desperately poor neighbors.
Anneka DiBias, a horse-riding, anti-hunting activist who creates the board game, ``The Minimum Wage Game,'' in which no one wins.
Forest Johnson, the roads commissioner who fires workers only to hire them back at a lower wage.
Watching over it all from a row of vibrantly painted rocking chairs at Moody's Variety & Lunch are the ``wise men,'' a Greek chorus of town elders who furnish opinionated observations on the inhabitants and happenings of Egypt, Maine.
There's a similar row of brightly colored rockers in the home Chute shares with her husband, Michael, and four little dogs. As Chute discusses her work, her life and her hopes for America, the dogs - two Scottish terriers, a Cairn terrier and a Scottie-cocker spaniel mix - perch on the rockers. Michael sits nearby, sipping coffee and watching his wife alternate between giggles and passionate discourse.
Chute became something of a literary folk hero when ``The Beans of Egypt, Maine'' won critical and popular acclaim, prompting some to describe her as a Down East William Faulkner.
Chute recently traveled to the West Coast, where a movie of ``Beans,'' as she calls her first novel, is nearing completion. She worried all the way there, fearing that the characters she lovingly had created wouldn't be treated well. But she was pleasantly surprised.
``I almost cried. I did cry when I watched it the first time. They did treat them with dignity. ... I was just thrilled,'' she said.
Chute's fans already are clamoring for the next installment of life below the poverty line in Egypt, Maine, but she says such suggestions are premature.
Still, she readily admits that she and Michael, who tends a cemetery in warmer weather, are almost out of money. She owns her home but doesn't have much money with which to live.
She thinks about writing a children's book. She hopes to put out a new version of ``Beans'' that includes refinements and essays on writing. And she expects that after she's cleaned her house, planted a garden and organized a few years' worth of family snapshots, she will begin some new character sketches.
As it is, she uproots herself each fall, leaving Michael's hometown because of raccoon hunting nearby. ``It's blood lust. It's like rape - gang rape. It's like lynching,'' she says of the hunting. And she fears the sounds of hunting in the night could aggravate a heart condition, with potentially fatal consequences.
``I don't really want to die yet,'' she says. ``I've got some business to take care of.''
by CNB