The American Protest Novel in a Time of Terror: Carolyn Chute's <i>Merry Men</i>

Abstract

Post-9/11, the radicalism of Carolyn Chute seemed to scare off the media and even the academy, and she still struggles to maintain a steady audience for her novels. Yet Chute's work remains strikingly relevant. Her protest novel, Merry Men, especially merits a fuller appraisal than it has so far received. A brief overview of the reception of Chute's rough, realistic, seemingly naive narratives reveals her to be as provocative and challenging as her most self-consciously postmodern or avant-garde contemporaries. It is unlikely that Chute will ever find the critics as congenial as they were in response to her first novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, published in 1985 by Ticknor & Fields, when Chute was thirty-seven. Here was a writer unlike any other though the novel's rural setting and largely uneducated characters inevitably brought comparisons to Faulkner's Snopes family and Flannery O'Connor's characters. Such comparisons characterize the bulk of mainstream critical response to her books to date.1 While the book jacket includes Chute's ironic remark that her work was involuntarily researched, publicity materials nonetheless emphasized the book's comic aspects. Critics tended to follow suit, glossing over the novel's trenchant social criticism in favor of the biographical details of Chute's own life, thereby producing a marketable image of authenticity, but with the reassurance that its author had written her way out of the poverty depicted in the novel. The first national profile of Chute, published in Time-Warner's People Weekly (Warner Books would issue the paperback the following year), informs its readers that Chute has paid off 10 years of debts with her Beans earnings; when a writer-friend encouraged her to send the finished draft to an agent in New York, we are told, Chute had to borrow money for postage. Class condescension (presumably unintended) characterized the book's reception among critics. A review in People classified Chute as a