Carolyn was raised in Cape Elizabeth, on the coast, beforern”the professional people came in and it got bnilt up.” She usesrn”professional people” as a pejorative, for the invaders inc’itabl’rncorrupt “what I like about small towns: You had a relationship.”rn”Even the person in town you don’t get along with, you hate,rnyou always wave to him,” interjects Michael. “You might bernstuck in a snowbank sometime, and he’ll pull you out.”rnNo one is going to pull Carolyn out of the critical hole whichrnSnow Man, her fourth novel, has dug her. She is buried underrnenough scorn and obloquy to suffocate a weaker woman. Andrnall because she loves her neighbors and her countr)’.rnSnow Man follows Robert Drummond, a hairy and occasionallyrnabominable patriot, a Maine militiaman who is betweenrnassa.ssinations, as it were: l ie has just executed one U.S.rnsenator from Massachusetts and would be drawing a bead onrnthe other were it not for the gunshot wound to his shoulder administeredrnby Boston police. Robert is taken in by a sympatheticrnhandyman on the estate of his intended second target, Sen.rnJerry Creighton, who is known as “the Liberal, which means hernworks hard for the rights of blacks and gays and women and foreignersrnwho have graduated from Harvard . . . or Yale .. . and hernworks hard for the rights of Big Business, as does the rest of Congress.”rnRobert will be nursed, in ways medical and otherwise, byrnCreighton’s daughter, an “angry, rivalrous ultrafeminist,” andrnhis Beacon Hill wife. The novel is about “what happens whenrnthe ‘left’ and the ‘right’ come together, heart to heart,” writesrnChute, who dedicates it to, among others, Noam Chomsky andrnthe 2nd Maine and Border Mountain militias.rnChute opens Snow Man with a brief scene that rings so truernyou half expect the novel to be interrupted while the author isrnissued a citation for having a Hate Thought. In a Boston barroomrndecidedly not that presided over by Ted Danson, cheersrngo up as the first senator’s assassination is reported on TV. “Getrn’cm all!” is the general sentiment, though one patron cautionsrnthe celebrants to “Watch out. I heard of a guy who was arrestedrnand put away for saying that kinda thing. An’ he was just a poorrnold retarded guy almost eighty years old.”rn”This is America. I speak mv mind,” replies one bold patron.rnTo which Chute appends, “In barrooms and living rooms andrndooryards and workplaces all over America, people discuss thernsenator’s demise, followed by awkward discussions of the dangersrnof speaking one’s mind.” It is a lesson that Carolyn Chute,rnheretofore a critics’ darling, is learning with a vengeance.rn”With all my other books I got jillions of interviews,” she says.rnBut with Snow Man, published in May, “they won’t interviewrnme. And I don’t think it’s that much more poorly written.” Thernfolks at Harcourt Brace tell her it’s “controversial,” to which shernreplies, “It can’t be controversial if it’s blacked out!”rnSnow Man’s assumption that militias are not splatball clubsrnfor homicidal rural losers but rather indigenous expressions ofrnhearty patriotism has, perhaps, kept Michiko Kakutani fromrnembracing the novel. But Chute’s disparagement of corporateladderrnfeminism is what reallv seeius to irk reviewers. Thernflunky in the New York Times singled out the passage in whichrnDrummond explodes, “the big-boy f-— in the White Housernand his arrogant bitch broad femniie-Ms. wifey and the bankerrnboys eat my Constitution for breakfast and tell me I can’t have arngun because I might f ‘ use it.”rnWe are not in Bobbie Ann Mason countr)’.rn’Tiberals hate working-class white men, especially those whorndon’t do dishes and who whistle at women,” wrote Chute in anrnessay censored by the Nation in the wake of the Littleton shooting.rn(Never mind that the dvnamite duo were spoiled suburbanrnbrats.) Carolyn Chute loves working-class men, and she believesrnthis forbidden love is one reason the worms of the criticalrnworld have turned on her. Feminist reviewers “don’t like bedroomrnscenes when women are having a nice time. They wantrnthem to be beaten in the head, then finally escape at the endrnfrom brutal guys. [Robert’s] not brutal, he’s j u s t . . . a guy. He’srnsweet.”rnOutlets that routinely praise novels featuring ever}’ sort of depravitv,rnfrom mutilation to a fling with a barnyard cutie, haverntaken after Snow Man, whose adultery scenes might aggravaternthe Legion of Decency but hardly qualify as “pornographic,” asrnPublishers Weekly had it. (PW also found the book “alarming inrntone.”)rnMy theory of why reviewers hate Snow Man is this: InrnChute’s previous novels, her Beans and Lelourneaus kept torntheir own trailers, their own hamlets. In Snow Man, one ofrnChute’s hairy Maine men has escaped—and he’s in their neighborhood,rnwaving a gun, messing with their women. Call the police!rnSnow Man is filled with angrily sardonic observations on thernchasm that separates corporate women from their working-classrnsisters. When Robert rues that his wife, Cindv, had to get a jobrnto pay his mother’s nursing home bills —the LOrimimondsrn”couldn’t take care of her anymore. Too busy ehasin’ the dollar”rn—the senator’s wife replies, “Well, that’s wonderful. . . . Arnwoman needs a career as much as a man does.”rnRobert explains that, as a housewife, Cindy had been a eannerrnand gardener and knitter and photographer and baker andrnblueberry picker; as a career gal, she was a slatherer of ketchuprnon strangers’ Quarter Pounders at McDonald’s. Excellent disciplinernfor a budding cog in the global economy, but the senator’srnwife, not being a conservative journalist, gets the point.rnChute has worked for even lower wages than a McDonald’srnhand — she was a charwoman and potato-picker before ThernBeans of Egypt, Maine—but it is the grey flannel blouse jobsrnthat she most despises. The “establishment feminists,” she tellsrnmc, “think we should all be head of a corporation or AnnrnRichards —the killingest governor —that’s where women belong.rnNobody belongs therel”rnChute signaled a turn toward the political when she dedicatedrnher third novel. Merry Men (1994), not only to farmersrn(“America’s last vestiges of freedom”) but also, less conventionally,rnto “all those millions who were born to be farmers, as theyrnhave been for thousands of years, but because of modern ‘education,’rnBig Business, and Mechanization they cannot be andrnwill never know their true gift but are instead herded into welfarernlines, prisons, or the slavery of Big Business.”rnThis is the plight of her people, and it has driven her to a ruralrnradicalism that is as American as Shavs’ Rebellion. “Is it reallvrnvirtuous to lie down in peace when your people are being assaidted,rnheart, body, and soul?” asks the senator’srncomprehending wife in Snow Man.rnI ask Carolyn if assassination is justifiable at this stage of thernAmerican descent. “It’s not nice,” she replies. “Oppression isrnnot nice. Revolution is not nice. But revolution is a reflex to oppression.rnIt’s natural. If somebody doesn’t like assassination andrnrevolution, they should speak to Cod and Mother Nature.”rnAnd Mother Nahire, Chute adds, “ain’t no sweet mincing littlernbeauh’ queen.”rn22/CHROiNICLESrnrnrn