Time's Island; portraits of the Vineyard Book

This book was a real disappointment. I hated it, but not because of its politics. I'll admit that I don't sympathize with the book's clear political bent. But more than that, I feel that the author's political worldview has driven her to write a book that is beyond her capacities as a writer--the richness and realism of her first novel has been sacrificed to tell a story she seems to need to tell, and while I suppose I respect her need to do so, the result's simply not a compelling read.

I read two Chute novels in close succession recently, after picking up a free copy of a vaguely anarchist 'zine in a coffeeshop that contained a lengthy epistolary interview with the author. I had dimly favorable memories of Chute's grim but exceptionally beautifully written bestseller debut, The Beans of Egypt, Maine. I had no idea, however, that the author was not only a gifted writer, but a gun-loving anarchist militia member with a powerful anticapitalist and antigovernment chip on her shoulder, and with only begrudging tolerance for the 'liberal elite' scholarly and bookish types who had been key advocates for her early work, and whose betrayal (in the form of generally scathing reviews for Snow Man) she clearly feels quite bitterly.

"Beans" tells the richly detailed story of the Bean family, a large and troubled clan of poor backwoods Mainers. The Beans, always dysfunctional, are increasingly disenfranchised by the development and gentrification that is beginning to overtake their rural territory--a phenomenon only scantly illustrated with a few interactions between colorful locals and city folk "from away" who've made their country homes on Bean turf. Although the interlopers are only barely sketched, the clear implication persists that more expensive houses and pediatricians from Boston are the wave of Egypt's future. The Bean clan and many of their hardscrabble local neighbors are left out of this, living in houses as yet unelectrified, struggling to keep logging jobs and stay out of jail.

But as difficult as Bean life is, and as repugnant as many of the characters and situations described in the novel undoubtedly are (their angry numbers include wife beaters, alcoholics, jailbirds, and even an incestuous aunt and nephew--their nonincestuous but perhaps somewhat codependent neighbors, a father and a young daughter who becomes one of the book's most important characters as the story develops, are set up in the opening as sort of more-functional counterparts to their analogues across the road, but even they live in the shadow of a quakingly virtuous, vindictive Christian grandmother), they are without exception described with sympathy. It is clear that these fictional characters, who are quite unlike most literary protagonists, are rendered with great love and with first-hand understanding of the socioeconomic challenges they face.

Snow Man, on the other hand, moves its setting into the Boston milieu of those from away types who are forcing people like the Beans from their homes, and her characters here just don't ring true. The increasingly-obsessive daughter and wife of a senator nurse a simple, allegedly purehearted but undoubtedly vindictive militia member who has just assassinated one of their patriarch's colleagues back to health in hiding in their Boston mansion. But these characters, along with being subject to inexplicable and unlikely affection for their secret murderous ward, simply ring false. Not because their stories aren't detailed enough--although the prose gets repetitive, their lives and situations are described to us in more than enough detail, albeit sometimes lazily and with an excessively expository bent--but because there's no sympathy for them. The author seems to regard them with too much contempt to even bother fleshing out their motivations more clearly, or making them more believable. The unhappy daughter is supposedly a rising professor of women's studies; the cursory description of her work that the alleged professor provides bears no resemblance to a real women's issues scholar. The working-class Bostonians on the senator's staff who (like a great underground wave throughout Boston's underclasses, the book would seemingly have us believe, but can't convince us) sympathize with the fugitive neither explain their allegiance nor seem like real people; perhaps Chute knows as few struggling urbanites as she does members of Congress or faculty members in women's studies programs.

Her strongest passages from a literary perspective are the book's most abstract, centering on descriptions of nature and setting. Too many of her people remain ciphers.

But ultimately, because the author doesn't seem to like her main ensemble members much, she hasn't been able to make them real to me. Because the setting winds up seeming so shallow and false, it's much more difficult to appreciate the reasonably solid--but nowhere near as rich as Beans--from which it is built.