When I read a snooty book review it usually catches my interest. Such reviews have often led me to a good book. I found a review of Carolyn Chute’s School on Heart’s Content Road in the December 2008-January 2009 issue of Working Waterfront by Tina Cohen. The headline. “A passionate, but bloated critique of the status quo.” I look down, 352 pages. Bloated?
It would be perfect as an opera, Tina says. An opera. Strident, melodramatic, full of stereotypes. There are parts that are strident, the exhortations of the The Screen, for instance. No melodrama that I could see. Grim and gritty but with enough humor that you don’t sink into total despair.
Stereotypes? A nonissue. Stereotypes are a way to make peripheral characters recognizable. Archetypes and symbols Tina calls these characters. I met no people in this story who were not everyday recognizable. Except, of course, Gordon St. Onge. And, well, a Willie Lancaster wouldn’t likely to come along very often either.
There is, however, much in this book to get a wide range of noses out of joint; noses on the left, right and much of the middle.
We are told that Chutes’ dialogue sounds like “slogans, phrases you’d see on a poster or hear at a rally.” But the belief of concerns of these characters bounce around kitchen tables (and tavern tables) from one end of rural America to another. I found little in the book to disagree with. The polygamy is a bit over-the-top, but I suspect it’s been put in mainly as a nose-disjointing device anyway.
Conclusion: I don’t think Tina likes these characters, and I don’t think she likes this book. She probably doesn’t like Carolyn Chute, either. I think this book caused Tina’s nose to flare and snort and then go painfully out of joint. I think she should have let this book pass, and chose to review something less disturbing.
I’ve loved all of Carolyn Chute’s books and I loved this one. I don’t like to use the word “truth” in sociopolitical terms because it’s so damn subjective, but the people, situations and conditions in this book exist. They are real. I just wish I could have grown up in The Settlement. Maybe I would have turned out a little less…conflicted.
Roy Clark
Swans Island