The Normal Times

Carolyn Chute, 1985

Daddy says the Beans are uncivilized animals. PREDATORS, he calls ’em. ‘If it runs, a Bean will shoot it! If it falls, a Bean will eat it,’ Daddy says, and his lip curls.

Set in the impoverished hills of rural Maine in an era that could be any time, but was most likely intended as sometime in the 1980s, Carolyn Chute’s debut novel is essentially a story of provincial poverty. Men are always drunk and women are always unhappily pregnant. There is no heroic character transformation, no one is saved, no one escapes. Harsh living gets even worse. That said, this tableau isn’t one meant to mock the stupid poors and the shitty places they live in. It also doesn’t treat them like a freak show made for gawking, like Winesburg, Ohio, for instance. There are no judgments and there is no romanticizing. It is simply a story of some lives, written in an unflowery third person omniscient narration.

The story follows a young girl named Earlene, living just barely on the right side of “the tracks”, obsessed with her trashy neighbors that live over there, on the wrong side. These are of course the big and messy Bean clan that infests the whole hillside. They are some of the most repulsive characters I’ve ever read in literature. Drunk, violent, grotesque. The women stumble and curse over a naked brood of dirty babies. The men break each other’s ribs and pass out under their trucks. Some are missing fingers, others grow their nails into claws so they can skin rabbits with their hands. The older kids have weird fixations like growing a mold collection in their room or trying to trick their relatives into fucking them. Some of the more mentally debilitated members of the family are leashed in a crumbling barn, and some just sleep there because they’re too drunk to know anything. The American Dream is so non-existent for these people, they’ve probably never even heard of it.

Earlene’s father has raised her with the assertion that they are above the Beans, because they live in a real house with real doors and are barely middle class. The mother is inexplicably absent, but Earlene’s Born Again grandmother is around to shame and scold. The matriarch Bean attempts to court Earlene’s single father by leaving rabbit innards in a bag on their doorstep, which doesn’t take. Earlene escapes the scolds of her home life by watching these people from her window nearly all day every day. Her father’s put downs only drive her obsession deeper until one day, after her father washes her mouth out with soap over an insult aimed at her bible-thumping grandma, Earlene flees into the darkness of the Bean’s rat nest. The encounters afterward decide the course of whatever her life may have been.

Things don’t get better for Earlene, or anyone else, as the book goes on. And they do not end well. Misery compounds over years. Any enlightenment gained is one of moral horrors, the kind of things one hears that they wish they hadn’t. People in this book do not overcome their circumstances, they don’t even stagnate. Like a slow draining sink their lives circle around and around, lesser and lesser, until all has drained away. One decently-bred Earlene is not enough to overcome the violent tide of a whole hill of Beans.

It’s not a fun read for anyone seeking action-packed plots or a story of characters that find some inner strength and triumph over their ugly world. It’s an unsympathetic character study of unlikable, shitty people. The book is unlike most literary novels; where weak characters become amazing, paupers become benevolent rich people, wimpy orphans take their hero’s journey and save the whole wide world. The story is depressing, and the characters are fucked, but people like them actually exist in real life with similar depressing stories that never get much better. Other writers have used such people to tell stories, but they make sure that it all works out to something better by the end, spiritually and often materialistically. Which is something that also sometimes happens in real life, but the term “generational poverty” exists for a reason and The Beans of Egypt, Maine paints a clear picture of that reason.

If you’d like to experience the dumb madness yourself, you can buy a copy here.