Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2008
Hardcover, 352 pages, $24
A passionate, but bloated, critique of status quo
I had an epiphany while reading The School on Heart’s Content Road, Carolyn Chute’s newest novel, which is set in a hardscrabble part of Maine, the same fictional location in some earlier work (most famously her first book, The Beans of Egypt, Maine).
It would be perfect, I thought, as an opera or operetta. Her characters seem- like those in opera-sketched to serve as archetypes, symbols. Chute’s rather colorful assortment illustrate various types of people who thrive or survive in rural, remote country-a place perhaps a lot like Parsonsfield, where she and her husband, Michael, live.
It was halfway through the book that I began to think of the playwright Bertolt Brecht and one of his best known works, “The Threepenny Opera.” He lived and wrote in Nazi Germany. Known as a communist, his plays were described as “passionate lectures.” He felt that emotion was a “bourgeois weakness” and distracted from the real message.
Brecht wrote about Mother Courage, the main character in his play of the same name, that he wanted to “harden” her character as to put her at a sufficient distance from the audience and guarantee an “anesthesia of the heart.” Critics called him “doctrinaire” as he railed against capitalist aggression and immoral war profiteering.
Chute is similarly heavy-handed in conveying “message.” Her dialogue can sound like slogans, phrases you’d see on a poster or hear at a rally. Her narrative bounces around a lot, jumping from one character’s perspective to another. Unfortunately, rather than letting us know any of them very well, it keeps us at a distance.
And what message is Chute conveying? Her characters disdain and distrust the mainstream American ethos. The government is in cahoots with corporations and enables their unlimited greed. Educational institutions and the media perpetuate lies, distort the truth, and promote immoral values. Schools are oppressive. So is consumerism. Mindless infotainment numbs us, strips us of our ability to think independently.
If the government really cared about the well-being of its citizens, wouldn’t there, for example, be accessible health care for all? And wouldn’t schools teach skills allowing for real self-expression and self-sufficiency, rather than reward conformity and dependency? Doing well-according to societal expectations- only distracts us from noticing that corporations and the government are using us or playing us. We are lulled into dangerous complacency.
I for one am glad Chute has cast a critical eye on the status quo. Recent events, including the tax-funded financial bailout, certainly add credence to her perspective. But this long novel conveying that message isn’t that easy to read. As a libretto, it might work better.