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With the publication of her 1985 breakthrough novel The Beans of Egypt, Maine, Carolyn Chute's literary voice was hailed as almost primeval, an immaculately conceived mouthpiece for Maine's rural white underclass. Chute's three subsequent novels have marked her as an uneven literary power—with Snow Man almost universally denounced—but as a major figure, nevertheless. Originality of both subject and tone is perhaps Chute's greatest strength. The Bean family and their literary brethren are landed white trash whose land may be a dump or a swamp, and their house a trailer, and yet they retain the kind of permanence and sustainability that we associate with New England's blue-blooded dynasties. This resilience is Chute's most optimistic message amidst her portraits of people whose lives provide a more obvious opportunity for despair.Chute's fictional Egypt, Maine, the setting of The Beans and Letourneau's Used Auto Parts is not a consumer culture per se so much as it is a culture of worthless goods that seems all-consuming. Her novels are narratives of failure by middle-class standards, but her characters seem indifferent to their own cultural entrapment; they live their lives fervidly and giddily, for the most part disinterested in middle-class "family values" such as attentive parenting, education, privacy, cleanliness, and good nutrition. Chute depicts an immobile class system that contrasts vividly to the sprawling and rambunctious Beans and their neighbors. These are messy lives and the telling of them is messy too, sometimes hard to follow; characters "gasp" and "choke" and "sputter" their words but seldom simply talk, and the twists and gaps and abrupt narrative shifts structurally replicate Chute's characters' disordered lives.
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