The Beans of Egypt, Maine

We had a lively discussion of this novel on Monday. Much of it centered on how we should think of the Beans, a working class family in rural Maine. From a middle or upper class point of view, the family is disfunctional and hapless, but the author regards them as victims of "big global businesss...the absurdities of modern education...this hi-tech, cold, cold, cold impersonal unaccountable new age." There's no doubt that the Beans have been left out of the American Dream, but they also don't seem to have any ambition to join it; rather, they see the evidence of that dream as a reproach and a sneer, and treat it accordingly. Rather than having an attitude of striving, they have no vision of how else they might live, no aspirations. In a show more strange way, they live in the moment of their poverty and aimlessness.
Underneath, there is a kind of desperation to them. The narrator, a child who lives across the road, is fascinated. Almost inevitably, when she grows up, she no longer narrates the story, but becomes a part of it too.

I am sure Maine is not the only place where people live in trailers, day by day, shrugging off education, with no expectations of success or advancement. This author knows the life intimately, and the picture she provides to us is both funny and sad.

If you are interested, there is an interview with Carolyn Chute on YouTube that is curiously revealing. show less

Slowly rotting mobile homes. A yard full of broken down machinery being sold for parts. The stench of old cigarettes and motor oil. Illegal hunting out of season. Gum disease. Jail time. Illiteracy. Unwanted pregnancies. Developmental problems. Physical and mental abuse. Children who go to bed hungry. Praise Jesus!

This book is a brutally honest depiction of grinding rural poverty presented in a matter-of-fact voice. If you want a hopeful story with plot resolution, look elsewhere. This book doesn’t end, it just stops.

I’m afraid modern urbanites will think these vignettes of a multi-generational tribe of hillbillies in rural Maine are exaggerated… but believe me, they are spot on. These are my people. My dad “got out”.

As roughly-hewn as this book felt (as well as the characters it describes), it was refreshing to be genuinely curious (and not at all certain) what was going to happen (or not). A glimpse into an underreported piece of the American landscape.

The Beans are a sprawling family in rural Maine. Beat up trailer-homes, shabby little houses, with broken down cars in dirt front-yards. You get the idea. Someone cleverly coined the term “hillbilly noir” and this one certainly fits that bill. The author uses a chaotic yet engaging narrative to tell their rough-tumble stories and does not veer away from the uglier aspects of this life, with physical and sexual abuse, flaring up from time to time. I am glad I finally got to this novel, which was first published in 1985.

I was struck by this blackly humorous, northern counterpart to Dorothy Allison's 'Bastard Out of Carolina.' Rough-hewn, hopeless and fatalistic, "The Beans of Egypt Maine" underscores a truism: that a culture of poverty and ignorance is self-perpetuating, that people born into such a world have very few options other than what their families give them. Family is both curse and blessing here, for out of it comes not only one's limiting world view, but also a fierce independence that prepares one to cope with it.

Chute's writing is fresh and on-target. The book jacket mentions her closeness to that lifestyle while growing up, and this believability certainly comes through. The humor is pure comic relief for what, to our eyes, must feel show more like a world of chaos and desperation. But there is another truism here: people are usually doing the best they can under their circumstances. Being from rural Virginia, I have known (of) families like the Beans here in the South, as well. The brutal effect of poverty is everywhere the same, and it is often countered by an enviable toughness. If there be live counterparts to the Beans, I might shrink from an invitation to meet them. But that does not prevent me from carrying a respect for the particular path they are fated to walk: in which just getting by is its own brand of heroism. show less

I’d love to tell you what this book was about, but I’m afraid it wasn’t about very much for me. There is a lot of blood, gore, fighting, and mistreatment. There are a lot of sexual encounters (thankfully not too graphically depicted) and a lot of references to sexual encounters that have already taken place and produced innumerable sad and unkempt children. There is squalor and poverty and lack of education, and men who have a too easy affinity for guns.

For me, it is fine to expose this way of life and its underbelly if you have some point to make regarding it besides the obvious one--that it exists. I just could not unearth any other reason for this book than that. I did not see any hope for these characters, but I also did not show more see any awareness in them, any desire to be better or different, any struggle to overcome or any love of or ambition for their children. There were no qualities that seemed to redeem them. They just seemed content to have this squalid way of life and to want to perpetuate it indefinitely.

I kept waiting for something to happen. Not another roll in the hay or senseless fight or unwanted baby...an event that would bring some kind of meaning to one of these characters. I waited for Earlene to realize that the last thing she really wanted to be was a Bean. But, alas, I waited in vain. I suppose once a Bean, always a Bean. show less

This is one of the oddest books I've ever read As another reviewer mentioned, the characters are almost uniformly unlikable; the setting, in an extreme povery zone in Maine, is off-putting; the plotline is minimal. Nevertheless, Chute manages to hold your interest and somehow makes you care about the characters. The book abounds in grotesque scenes and ugly actions. Still, you feel that the book somehow presents a true picture of what life is like on the underside of the American dream.

I was not happy with the author's afterword to this edition, and it's quite apparent that she has a considerable axe to grind. Even so, this book is well worth a read; it's sort of like a post-modern "Grapes of Wrath" without the redemption factor.