Carolyn Chute, "The Beans of Egypt, Maine"

            Carolyn Chute, in her novel “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” presents a narrative of the poor in a rural Maine community. In a TIME article from 2009 (found at: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1932076,00.html), Christopher Ketcham surfaces the parallels between the lives of the novel’s characters and the experiences of the best-selling author, reminding readers that, though fiction, class oppression and the disturbing effects of deep poverty are, indeed, reality.

            Chute is an acclaimed author, often compared by critics to “Faulker and Steinbeck because what she wrote about so well and so convincingly was the back-broken underclass in Maine.” Convincingly, it seems because Chute draws the character of Earlene Beal from herself.

            As the image of Roberta Bean and her quickly-multiplying children flashes in the reader’s mind, Chute underlines the lack of healthcare in these communities; in fact, Chute and her husband Michael—one of those “Maine woodsmen with beards to their bellies” strikingly similar to Beal Bean—lost a baby in 1982 “after the local hospital refused to treat the complications from her pregnancy.”

            Within the novel, the Bean establishment is anything but a home; it’s dilapidated, crammed, and dirty. Coincidentally—or not—Chute and her husband “live in a drafty unfinished house with no hot water.” Indeed, they have no septic system, using an outhouse even in the coldest of Maine winters, just as we see when Beal Bean shovels a path through the feet of snow to the outhouse in their yard.

            In appearance, too, the main character of “Beans” and the author of the novel coincide. Like Earlene’s haggard mien in the concluding chapters, Chute—as the writer of the article sees her—“wore big boots and a blue bandanna that tied back long kinky hair.” This similarity suggest the possibility of an autobiographical factor in the fictional piece, which begs deeper reading. Rather than merely a bleak image of poverty in a rural community, Chute is attempting to expose this condition of existence—as reality.