MERRY MEN
Carolyn Chute
1994
Harcourt Brace & Company
$24.95
Carolyn Chute visited Salem State College in 1989 and 1992, reading from
works-in-progress (including Merry Men) and spending time inside
our classrooms. She gave sound advice to students about staying in college
and explained how her wide-ranging interests and courses in the social sciences
and psychology improved her writing. She has not let the success of her
two earlier novels, Letourneau's Used Auto Parts (1988) and her national
best seller The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1984), gobble up her honesty
and kindness. Permeating her talks was a wonderful sense of humor, manifested
beforehand only in her fictional characters from rural Maine.
I looked forward to Carolyn Chute's latest work, Merry Men. In writing
classes, I've used Chute's prose to illustrate such cardinal rules of writing
as "Show, don't tell." She is a prime exemplar of how detail and
specifics bring a manuscript to life.
Her observations in Merry Men are stunning, in fact breathtaking,
but the novel as a whole -- it runs 694 pages -- seemed to sprawl. I wanted
to rein in the somewhat extraneous sub-plots. However, it is Ms. Chute's
poetry, her astute use of language, that hold the novel together. The language
lingers with you days and weeks after the book is returned to the shelf.
Like her other books, this novel is set in the mythical Egypt. In fact,
the families Bean and Letourneau are sprinkled throughout this work, still
living in ramshackle homes, scraping together a life. We are all in this
together, we have the same hungers -- these are the major themes
that Ms. Chute develops in Merry Men.
Five main characters compose this book's galaxy of stars. Lloyd Barrington,
Egypt's grave digger, is a modern-day Maine Robin Hood whose shoulder-length
hair is as long as Errol Flynn's and whose a moustache is even longer.
Lloyd's illegitimate half brother, Forest (as in Sherwood?) Johnson, Jr.,
takes care of the county's roads. The town's activist, with her silver eyes
and stringy gold hair, is Anneka DiBias. Her issues include the killing
of innocent mothers who fail to wear blaze orange in the woods and the high
costs of medications. Her husband, Carroll Plummer, is a cousin of Lloyd's.
In striking contrast to these citizens of Egypt, Chute gives us Gwen. Considering
what the other families do not have, Gwen possesses plenty.
As the story begins, Lloyd is a motherless youngster of eight. His father,
Edmund, travels around Egypt having many affairs, including one with Betty
Johnson. A nice women in every other way, Betty has a son resulting from
the liaison whom she names after her husband, Forest Johnson, Sr.
When Lloyd is young he is happy, and little seems to mark the delineation
between the haves and the have nots. He drives around in the cab of his
father's truck, planting saplings along the avenues of Egypt. In addition
to writing poetry which he sticks on the family refrigerator, Lloyd also
costumes himself as a pirate and wears cardboard crowns, foreshadowing his
later life as king of the underground.
The plot line jumps from the early sixties to the mid-seventies, with both
Lloyd and Forest, Jr. achieving manhood, but the focus is on the young Forest.
Time marches on, and Lloyd begins to steal from Forest, who holds contracts
from the state for road work. Lloyd takes equipment from Forest and sells
it for cash. Subsequent to this, people in Egypt in financial trouble find
money in old mayonnaise jars wrapped in a graveyard flag, with a line or
two of poetry included for solace. Sometimes the gifts are of food. "To
be certain of your next supper gives your whole day more zip." Chute
is careful to portray Lloyd as an outlaw and not a criminal. He attends
college and receives his degree. He is the Swamp Fox, Robin Hood, Zorro.
Forest, who lives within the realm of man-made law, is more dishonest than
his half-brother, who is concerned with humankind. Forest fires men and
then hires them back at half salary. With their families starving, they
knuckle under. His own son, Jeffrey, is an artist unable to make a living;
Forest cannot connect with the boy.
More time passes. While very little of the book takes place in the eighties
-- a mere dozen pages is devoted to that period -- the blame for the people's
demise, and for their apparent lot in life, is mired in the backwash of
that particular decade. Here Chute's prose seems polemical.
By the end of the novel a pregnant Anneka DiBias and Carroll Plummer are
reduced to living in the back camper of a truck. Carroll makes end meet
by finding odd jobs, but we are always made painfully aware that when he
does find work, it is at another's expense or misfortune. "I've got
more work coming up with Jackman," Carroll cheers to Anneka. "Big
lot over to Harrison . . . some guy over there died."
The young married are unable to afford the medications they need. Anneka
is on heart medication. Carroll is on an antidepressant to control his moods
and his drinking. An ex-con, he has spent time in jail because of a hit-and-run
drunk-driving incident in his early twenties. What type of work is there
for Carroll? "A Saturday now and again at the salvage yard. And cutting
for Del Jackman's crew with Del's brother got off his drunk."
They live in a place called Miracle City -- a collection of campers such
as the Plummers', mobile homes, and run-down shacks. You can hear people
cough from one home to the next. These are the chronic poor.
Contrasted with the denizens of Miracle City is the fatherless Gwen. She
has a beautiful home and lives in colored spaces of "all creams and
wheatens and whites and off-whites, mint and trailing-off yellows. Gwen
lives in what Chute describes as a "look at me house," surrounded
by lawns, lattice work, arbors, and a deck.
Meanwhile, Anneka goes through six days of labor in a camper. A nameless
doctor refuses to keep her in the hospital unless her labor is progressive.
Gwen's lot in life doesn't seem to be of her own doing. The daughter of
a doctor, she is a nature photographer who does not speak to her neurotic
mother nor her loveless brothers. The names of her cats, Apollo and Athena,
underscore the rarefied air this woman lives in. She comes home to an answering
machine holding messages from travel agents and a friend named Ariel. Over
in Miracle City, folks are having their phones shut off at an alarming rate.
Anneka and Carroll must drive to the parking lot of the IGA Supermarket
to call the doctor and beg to be admitted to the hospital.
Gwen takes up with Lloyd, who comes one night to deliver firewood. In the
dark his moustache is "lavender, and blood red and blue," giving
Lloyd a mystical appeal. He makes a face as if "the light hurts his
eyes. Like he has come out from tooling in a dark place into the light of
day." He gives Gwen an honest cord of wood, and she is taken aback
by this, reflecting on how unlike so many other businesses it is. Lloyd
stands there in the quiet darkness in front of his small band of helpers,
who unload the rich widow's wood.
At the end of the novel Ms. Chute becomes preachy, as if afraid that the
reader won't get it --what she's been after for the past 600 pages. Near
the beginning of Merry Men Lloyd writes a poem called "Rich,"
asserting that rich people are mean spirited and small-eyed. "Do you
hate them," the poem concludes, "You better." Chute has Gwen
go out with Lloyd and attempt to see what life is like on the other side.
But Chute doesn't have Lloyd return the favor. His philosophies never advance
past those of the poem he wrote at the age of eight, his college education
notwithstanding.
The mill closes, and Anneka tries to arrange a protest, designing placards
questioning the whereabouts of promised bonuses, retirement plans, and insurance
coverage. The fired workers seem to lack the strength to go on. Chute then
picks up the torch of her exhausted characters and invents new ones as deputies
of her complaints and theories concerning big business, taking special aim
at big business's role in education policies, stating that education fails
to teach children to be self-reliant and work with their hands. Big business
and the education establishment are interested only in competitiveness.
"There's been no interest thus far on the part of education to teach
our kids self-discipline, interdependence, and a sense of responsibility
to others . . . certainly not working together. Only competition."
Ms. Chute takes on a good deal in Merry Men with her breathless,
ellipsis-ridden prose. She fires her poetry and hopes her aims finds its
mark.
While advanced education might not have saved some of Chute's people, it
certainly allowed the self-taught Anneka to rise above and hope for a future
beyond her present circumstances. It had the college-educated poet helping
his neighbors. I feel as if they will continue to keep on -- trying as best
they can. The real crime is not failure or poverty. The real crime is never
having tried at all.
Regina Robbins-Flynn begins her fourth year of teaching English courses at Salem State College this fall. She makes her home in Salem with her husband and two daughters and divides her time further as a writer and a political activist.