The Beans of Egypt, Maine Book

The Bean family of the title are a motley group who bum and breed in Maine's bucolic underbelly. They're poor -- really poor -- but Carolyn Chute doesn't condemn them or even keep them at an ironic distance. She celebrates them. "If it runs, a Bean will shoot it!" she writes. "If it falls, a Bean will eat it!"

"[My books] have made the professional-class people in New York very mad because they said things in some of the reviews like, 'She sounds like she's proud to be working class. She doesn't want to be like us. What's the matter with her?'" Chute once told me. "In fact, there was one reviewer of Beans in The New York Times who kind of caught some of that. She was sharp. . . . I thought she was really on to something the way she kept going, 'Chute's nuts.'"

She giggled.

"Well, I mean she was really on to something because it was so different from her thinking."

Chute has taken her defense of her characters further than most authors. She complained that readers and especially critics have been too quick to find incest in Beans. There was the one incident, sure, she maintained. But that was it. She recalled a social worker approaching her at a reading and telling her that her denial of this central fact about her novel is probably the result of abuse as a child. "I mean, there was even a Rhodes scholar," Chutes added, her voice quick and emotional, "and he told me what the book meant, and I told him it didn't, and he said, 'Well, I'm a Rhodes scholar.' And I said, 'Well, I'm the author!' And he didn't even pronounce my name right."

It's Chute as in chickadee, by the way.

Chute was concerned enough about the misreading to take the unusual step of composing a postscript for a 1995 reprinting of Beans. In it she writes: "I often wonder if so many reviewers hadn't misinterpreted Beans as a book on incest, would anybody have bothered to pick up the book at all? Aren't the lives of ordinary people, stressed to breaking point by the crumbling of America's big dream, interesting enough?"

Of course, when I met Chute, she was active in a militia of her own organization and brandishing a Russian-made assault rifle. So some may find it odd that such a woman would wonder about the establishment's skepticism toward her. But if nothing else, Chute came by her beliefs and her characters honestly. "I have lived poverty," she once remarked. "I didn't choose it. No one would choose humiliation, pain and rage."

Instead, she chose Beans.

"When I finished the book, I'd just lost my kid," she remembered. "I couldn't get into the hospital because I didn't have any health insurance and they treated us like dirt. I was a month overdue. I had a 104 temperature and the baby is starved because its umbilical cord is shrunk away. And the police had to fight with them to let me in."

Chute, a mother at 16 and grandmother at 37, was eventually admitted. "But then as we go to leave the hospital, they go, 'How you gonna pay for this?' So they kill our kid and we're supposed to pay for it. And the lady goes, 'Well, I certainly hope you don't do this again!'"

This is exactly the sort of judgment that Beans is angrily rebelling against. It's a rebellion, however, that seems to have failed. Instead of inspiring class-consciousness, it has inspired Gen-X irony, as in the case of rock stars Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, who christened their baby Frances Bean because, in the Bill-and-Ted-ish words of Spin magazine, "The Beans of Egypt, Maine is, like, the ultimate white-trash novel."

It's not. It's much better than that.

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