THE SCHOOL ON HEART'S CONTENT ROAD -

Carolyn Chute

PUB GROUP WEST

2009

400 páginas

13h 20m

ISBN-10: 0802144152

“The School on Heart’s Content Road” is as idiosyncratic as it is engaging. A mytho­poetics of the Second Amendment isn’t exactly common in modern American literary fiction. But neither is the depiction of contemporary American poverty: of the slow, relentless grind of never quite having enough, of the leaching of hope and ambition from those for whom a job at Wal-Mart is a rare opportunity, of the impossible double-bind choices made by the poor every day. This is a beautiful novel, a polemical novel, a messy novel. It’s a love song to a part of America that doesn’t have much of a voice, and is armed. Chute is such an extra­ordinary, vivid, empathic writer that it would be tempting to swoon into the love and overlook the bullets. To do that, however, would also be to dim the considerable power here: if the despair and the tenderness are real, so are the guns.
The main story, however, centers on the gradual meeting and loose connections among three characters: Mickey Gammon, a lonely, smart, disaffected 15-year-old dropout who finds a semi-home in the local Border Mountain Militia; 6-year-old Jane Meserve, a biracial child who has found a semi-home at the Settlement because her mother is in jail and her father is gone; and Gordon St. Onge, the charismatic 39-year-old who founded and leads the Settlement and is one craggy, sexy, Acadian devil to boot. When she channels the souls of these complicated, moving individuals, Chute is mesmerizing and heartbreaking, with a dead-on sense of humor.