The poverty that poisons the soul

The School on Heart's Content Road

A Novel

Carolyn Chute

Atlantic Monthly Press: 384 pp., $24

So much begins with poverty. Here in the land of literature, we forget that sometimes. Carolyn Chute, beginning with her first novel 23 years ago, "The Beans of Egypt, Maine," and now, with "The School on Heart's Content Road," the first in a projected five-novel series, pushes it in our faces. Chute is not in the mincing-words business. She is not in the marketing business. She is in the writing business. When democracy allows (even causes) senseless and terrible things to happen to poor people; when institutions (corporations, bureaucracies) take away people's dignity as well as their property and their ability to care for their children, there are consequences. Children are deformed -- emotionally and physically -- by suffering. They seek refuge wherever they can find it -- places to get their needs met. Adults are deformed by suffering and injustice. They can become heartless, even dangerous. So this is a terrifying book. Because, as in the case of poor Dr. Frankenstein's monster, we helped to create this world.

"The School on Heart's Content Road" is set in Egypt, Maine, in 2000. It begins and ends with a 15-year-old boy named Mickey Gammon, crushed by the public school system (body and soul) and seeking refuge from the grinding poverty of his half-brother's house. In that house, a 4-year-old child is dying of cancer without pain medication because his parents cannot afford pain medication. Social workers and their myriad forms are no good whatsoever. Mickey does odd jobs for the local militia, a far-right group of 400 Bible-based patriots run by a man named Rex.

There is another group in town. The Settlement is a far-left group of people living on 900 acres and led by Gordon St. Onge, whom some call "the prophet." He is polygamous. The Settlement members home-school their children, grow their own food, make their own clothes, generate their own energy (from wind) and live off the great grid in every sense of the term. Gordon has taken in a 6 1/2 -year-old girl named Jane whose mother has recently been arrested for drug possession. Jane, young as she is, has been encouraged by local narcs and FBI agents (nice men with candy) to rat on her mother and other members of the Settlement (especially Gordon). A neighbor is always ready with a tape recorder to document her stories.