nobody's fool and the beans

So, I liked Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool and didn't like Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine which is contrary to what I expected in both cases.

I don't have to much to say. In Beans, the protagonist is Earlene, a hard-to-find girl from a working-class but trying to be respectable Christian family who marries into the epicly white trash Bean family. The family is violent, incestuous, in and out of jail, trash on lawns, tons of kids, no electricity, etc.

Nobody's Fool centers around Donald Sullivan, 60 yr old laborer with a bad knee and a grudge against his violent, alcholoic, dead abusive dad, Big Jim Sullivan, whose house Sully lets fall into satisfying disrepair. Sully is likened to his old decrepit Doberman, a dog he maimed by poisoning it as part of a ploy to steal a snowblower from his married but roving employer Carl Roebuck. Set in small town Bath, NY. The town feels like an extended family, thrown together by circumstance of birth.

I wanted to like the Chute but felt that she was forcing the characterization of this family almost to the point of caricature. I'm not saying I wanted her characters to be noble. All I'm saying is I wanted to at least care about them which I didn't.

The great Laura Hapke gives Chute more credit than I do:

"Like the white trash novelists in the serio-comic mode of William Faulkner and Erksine Caldwell, Chute deconstructs the eccentricity of the impoverished. Unlike her predecessors, Chute charts an unsparing ethnography that becomes a 'brother's keeper' catechism of her (liberal-minded) reader. In modern psychological parlance, the Beans perform their lives by combining a fronteir self-reliance with a dependence on government handouts. Impossible to idealize, they are the sum of their junk-filled lawns, broken-down pickups, casual child rearing, and hygiene practices as limited as their ambitions. But the more one reads in this novel, the more the Beans' twinned obliviousness and ignorance seem to be, not evidence of genetic inferiority, but voiceless stridency against being labeled bestial. Although her reviewers find no poetry in the Beans' recalcitrant poverty, Chute argues that Maine white trash actually subvert the normative categories of 'jobless,' 'employed,' and 'dependent.' Strange as it is, the Beans'caginess, while economically futile, jettisons economic incentive in the name of emotional survival."

Labor's Text 313