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Snow Man
A mother and daughter see the news reports that a senator has been assassinated in the lobby of Boston's venerable Parker House. They hear that his killer, Robert Drummond, has escaped, prompting a nationwide manhunt. And yet Robert, wounded and suffering, has not gone far. He has, in fact, found refuge in the garage of another senator's Beacon Hill home, a place where the obvious options are death and discovery. But the unexpected happens in the form of the senator's daughter and wife. Despite the media frenzy, mother and daughter find themselves faced with a dying man whose desperate straits-both before and after the crime-they cannot ignore, and the two women become intimately involved with a man whose intelligence and physical presence weave a mesmerizing spell.
- GenresFiction
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
77 people want to read
About the author
Carolyn Chute
13 books112 followersChute's first, and best known, novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, was published in 1985 and made into a 1994 film of the same name, directed by Jennifer Warren. Chute's next two books, Letourneau's Used Auto Parts (1988) and Merry Men (1994), are also set in the town of Egypt, Maine.
Chute also speaks out publicly about class issues in America and publishes "The Fringe," a monthly collection of in-depth political journalism, short stories, and intellectual commentary on current events. She once ran a satiric campaign for governor of Maine.
Her job career has included waitress, chicken factory worker, hospital floor scrubber, shoe factory worker, potato farm worker, tutor, canvasser, teacher, social worker, and school bus driver, 1970s-1980s; part-time suburban correspondent, Portland Evening Express, Portland, Maine, 1976-81; instructor in creative writing, University of Southern Maine, Portland, 1985.
She now lives in Parsonsfield, Maine, near the New Hampshire border, in a home with no telephone, no computer, and no fax machine, and an outhouse in lieu of a working bathroom. She is married to Michael Chute, a local handyman who never learned to read; they have a daughter, Joannah, and several grandchildren.
- from Wikipedia
Chute also speaks out publicly about class issues in America and publishes "The Fringe," a monthly collection of in-depth political journalism, short stories, and intellectual commentary on current events. She once ran a satiric campaign for governor of Maine.
Her job career has included waitress, chicken factory worker, hospital floor scrubber, shoe factory worker, potato farm worker, tutor, canvasser, teacher, social worker, and school bus driver, 1970s-1980s; part-time suburban correspondent, Portland Evening Express, Portland, Maine, 1976-81; instructor in creative writing, University of Southern Maine, Portland, 1985.
She now lives in Parsonsfield, Maine, near the New Hampshire border, in a home with no telephone, no computer, and no fax machine, and an outhouse in lieu of a working bathroom. She is married to Michael Chute, a local handyman who never learned to read; they have a daughter, Joannah, and several grandchildren.
- from Wikipedia
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 6, 2009
I wasn't entirely sure what I thought of this book. It is
about a militia member who kills a U.S. senator and goes to
bed with the guy's wife and daughter...
Carolyn Chute's politics are eccentric. She had formed
a somewhat left-leaning militia group...half in jest.
about a militia member who kills a U.S. senator and goes to
bed with the guy's wife and daughter...
Carolyn Chute's politics are eccentric. She had formed
a somewhat left-leaning militia group...half in jest.
March 26, 2017
I know my reading of "Snow Man" is shaped by my love of Chute's work as well as contemporary events. She's long been aligned with the not right/left militia "wing" and I think this offshoot of "The School on Heart's Content Road" is a worthy book.
The characters of Robert Drummond is well-shaped and clear. Chute succeeds best with him, I think, in terms of capturing the frustration of those who work their asses off and yet are still left behind to flounder in the wake of the rich and contemptuous who benefit from the labor of the poor.
The Occupy Movement rose and rises still. The complaints and laments of those left behind linger and rear up. The rich and connected remain so.
What most moved me about this novel is the idea of hiding in clear sight, of labeling (liberal, left/right wing, dispossessed), of making moves toward those you don't really understand, of smoking dope with the bad guy and calling it good, of being trapped in your own skin and circumstance.
The vision of Robert exiting the Mercedes and heading up the road to his Maine home after fleeing the FBI in Boston doesn't ring true, but...you know that he'll be caught eventually and pay whatever price the big shots think he should. And the media will cover it endlessly...until it lets it go.
Chute says that this novel is a "possible" story of the New England Militia Movement, but is not "true" in the literal sense. I think it's worth learning a lot about militia movements throughout America and thinking about why they form and grow. And have for quite a while.
The characters of Robert Drummond is well-shaped and clear. Chute succeeds best with him, I think, in terms of capturing the frustration of those who work their asses off and yet are still left behind to flounder in the wake of the rich and contemptuous who benefit from the labor of the poor.
The Occupy Movement rose and rises still. The complaints and laments of those left behind linger and rear up. The rich and connected remain so.
What most moved me about this novel is the idea of hiding in clear sight, of labeling (liberal, left/right wing, dispossessed), of making moves toward those you don't really understand, of smoking dope with the bad guy and calling it good, of being trapped in your own skin and circumstance.
The vision of Robert exiting the Mercedes and heading up the road to his Maine home after fleeing the FBI in Boston doesn't ring true, but...you know that he'll be caught eventually and pay whatever price the big shots think he should. And the media will cover it endlessly...until it lets it go.
Chute says that this novel is a "possible" story of the New England Militia Movement, but is not "true" in the literal sense. I think it's worth learning a lot about militia movements throughout America and thinking about why they form and grow. And have for quite a while.
September 15, 2008
This book was a real disappointment. I hated it, but not because of its politics. I'll admit that I don't sympathize with the book's clear political bent. But more than that, I feel that the author's political worldview has driven her to write a book that is beyond her capacities as a writer--the richness and realism of her first novel has been sacrificed to tell a story she seems to need to tell, and while I suppose I respect her need to do so, the result's simply not a compelling read.
I read two Chute novels in close succession recently, after picking up a free copy of a vaguely anarchist 'zine in a coffeeshop that contained a lengthy epistolary interview with the author. I had dimly favorable memories of Chute's grim but exceptionally beautifully written bestseller debut, The Beans of Egypt, Maine. I had no idea, however, that the author was not only a gifted writer, but a gun-loving anarchist militia member with a powerful anticapitalist and antigovernment chip on her shoulder, and with only begrudging tolerance for the 'liberal elite' scholarly and bookish types who had been key advocates for her early work, and whose betrayal (in the form of generally scathing reviews for Snow Man) she clearly feels quite bitterly.
"Beans" tells the richly detailed story of the Bean family, a large and troubled clan of poor backwoods Mainers. The Beans, always dysfunctional, are increasingly disenfranchised by the development and gentrification that is beginning to overtake their rural territory--a phenomenon only scantly illustrated with a few interactions between colorful locals and city folk "from away" who've made their country homes on Bean turf. Although the interlopers are only barely sketched, the clear implication persists that more expensive houses and pediatricians from Boston are the wave of Egypt's future. The Bean clan and many of their hardscrabble local neighbors are left out of this, living in houses as yet unelectrified, struggling to keep logging jobs and stay out of jail.
But as difficult as Bean life is, and as repugnant as many of the characters and situations described in the novel undoubtedly are (their angry numbers include wife beaters, alcoholics, jailbirds, and even an incestuous aunt and nephew--their nonincestuous but perhaps somewhat codependent neighbors, a father and a young daughter who becomes one of the book's most important characters as the story develops, are set up in the opening as sort of more-functional counterparts to their analogues across the road, but even they live in the shadow of a quakingly virtuous, vindictive Christian grandmother), they are without exception described with sympathy. It is clear that these fictional characters, who are quite unlike most literary protagonists, are rendered with great love and with first-hand understanding of the socioeconomic challenges they face.
Snow Man, on the other hand, moves its setting into the Boston milieu of those from away types who are forcing people like the Beans from their homes, and her characters here just don't ring true. The increasingly-obsessive daughter and wife of a senator nurse a simple, allegedly purehearted but undoubtedly vindictive militia member who has just assassinated one of their patriarch's colleagues back to health in hiding in their Boston mansion. But these characters, along with being subject to inexplicable and unlikely affection for their secret murderous ward, simply ring false. Not because their stories aren't detailed enough--although the prose gets repetitive, their lives and situations are described to us in more than enough detail, albeit sometimes lazily and with an excessively expository bent--but because there's no sympathy for them. The author seems to regard them with too much contempt to even bother fleshing out their motivations more clearly, or making them more believable. The unhappy daughter is supposedly a rising professor of women's studies; the cursory description of her work that the alleged professor provides bears no resemblance to a real women's issues scholar. The working-class Bostonians on the senator's staff who (like a great underground wave throughout Boston's underclasses, the book would seemingly have us believe, but can't convince us) sympathize with the fugitive neither explain their allegiance nor seem like real people; perhaps Chute knows as few struggling urbanites as she does members of Congress or faculty members in women's studies programs.
Her strongest passages from a literary perspective are the book's most abstract, centering on descriptions of nature and setting. Too many of her people remain ciphers.
But ultimately, because the author doesn't seem to like her main ensemble members much, she hasn't been able to make them real to me. Because the setting winds up seeming so shallow and false, it's much more difficult to appreciate the reasonably solid--but nowhere near as rich as Beans--from which it is built.
I read two Chute novels in close succession recently, after picking up a free copy of a vaguely anarchist 'zine in a coffeeshop that contained a lengthy epistolary interview with the author. I had dimly favorable memories of Chute's grim but exceptionally beautifully written bestseller debut, The Beans of Egypt, Maine. I had no idea, however, that the author was not only a gifted writer, but a gun-loving anarchist militia member with a powerful anticapitalist and antigovernment chip on her shoulder, and with only begrudging tolerance for the 'liberal elite' scholarly and bookish types who had been key advocates for her early work, and whose betrayal (in the form of generally scathing reviews for Snow Man) she clearly feels quite bitterly.
"Beans" tells the richly detailed story of the Bean family, a large and troubled clan of poor backwoods Mainers. The Beans, always dysfunctional, are increasingly disenfranchised by the development and gentrification that is beginning to overtake their rural territory--a phenomenon only scantly illustrated with a few interactions between colorful locals and city folk "from away" who've made their country homes on Bean turf. Although the interlopers are only barely sketched, the clear implication persists that more expensive houses and pediatricians from Boston are the wave of Egypt's future. The Bean clan and many of their hardscrabble local neighbors are left out of this, living in houses as yet unelectrified, struggling to keep logging jobs and stay out of jail.
But as difficult as Bean life is, and as repugnant as many of the characters and situations described in the novel undoubtedly are (their angry numbers include wife beaters, alcoholics, jailbirds, and even an incestuous aunt and nephew--their nonincestuous but perhaps somewhat codependent neighbors, a father and a young daughter who becomes one of the book's most important characters as the story develops, are set up in the opening as sort of more-functional counterparts to their analogues across the road, but even they live in the shadow of a quakingly virtuous, vindictive Christian grandmother), they are without exception described with sympathy. It is clear that these fictional characters, who are quite unlike most literary protagonists, are rendered with great love and with first-hand understanding of the socioeconomic challenges they face.
Snow Man, on the other hand, moves its setting into the Boston milieu of those from away types who are forcing people like the Beans from their homes, and her characters here just don't ring true. The increasingly-obsessive daughter and wife of a senator nurse a simple, allegedly purehearted but undoubtedly vindictive militia member who has just assassinated one of their patriarch's colleagues back to health in hiding in their Boston mansion. But these characters, along with being subject to inexplicable and unlikely affection for their secret murderous ward, simply ring false. Not because their stories aren't detailed enough--although the prose gets repetitive, their lives and situations are described to us in more than enough detail, albeit sometimes lazily and with an excessively expository bent--but because there's no sympathy for them. The author seems to regard them with too much contempt to even bother fleshing out their motivations more clearly, or making them more believable. The unhappy daughter is supposedly a rising professor of women's studies; the cursory description of her work that the alleged professor provides bears no resemblance to a real women's issues scholar. The working-class Bostonians on the senator's staff who (like a great underground wave throughout Boston's underclasses, the book would seemingly have us believe, but can't convince us) sympathize with the fugitive neither explain their allegiance nor seem like real people; perhaps Chute knows as few struggling urbanites as she does members of Congress or faculty members in women's studies programs.
Her strongest passages from a literary perspective are the book's most abstract, centering on descriptions of nature and setting. Too many of her people remain ciphers.
But ultimately, because the author doesn't seem to like her main ensemble members much, she hasn't been able to make them real to me. Because the setting winds up seeming so shallow and false, it's much more difficult to appreciate the reasonably solid--but nowhere near as rich as Beans--from which it is built.
July 16, 2007
Snow Man is one of the worst books I've ever read. Still. From a profile I once wrote of Carolyn Chute:
The critics adored her debut, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, in 1985, while subsequent reaction was decidedly mixed. The New York Times called her third novel, Merry Men, "bad," while also naming it a notable book of the year for 1994. The paper described her latest work, Snow Man, as "absurd and rather ugly." The Houston Chronicle thought it "plainly sophomoric," while a reviewer in Cleveland labeled it "one of the worst books I've ever read." Meanwhile, here in Maine, I've personally encountered both strong enthusiasm for her work and the sense -- especially among those who prefer lobster to jerky -- that Carolyn Chute is not something you discuss in polite company.
Chute chalks it up to the sort of people she writes about. "The only time they [the literary elite] write about working class people, it's, 'My father used to beat me and finally I escaped and got a good education and became a yuppie.' That's the only time . . . It's always about finally becoming a consumer. 'We're so lucky now!'"
She giggles.
Perhaps what has raised eyebrows most is the fact that she doesn't condemn her characters -- a motley group who bum and breed in Maine's bucolic underbelly -- or even keep them at an ironic distance. She celebrates them. Whether it's the Beans ("If it runs, a Bean will shoot it! If it falls, a Bean will eat it!") or Snow Man's Robert Drummond, a Maine militia member who executes a U.S. senator before bedding another senator's wife and daughter, Chute's writing demands, if not always receives, a reader's sympathy.
"[My books] have made the professional-class people in New York very mad because they said things in some of the reviews like, 'She sounds like she's proud to be working class. She doesn't want to be like us. What's the matter with her?'" Chute says. "In fact, there was one reviewer of Beans in The New York Times who kind of caught some of that. She was sharp . . . I thought she was really on to something the way she kept going, 'Chute's nuts.'"
She giggles again.
"Well, I mean she was really on to something because it was so different from her thinking."
The critics adored her debut, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, in 1985, while subsequent reaction was decidedly mixed. The New York Times called her third novel, Merry Men, "bad," while also naming it a notable book of the year for 1994. The paper described her latest work, Snow Man, as "absurd and rather ugly." The Houston Chronicle thought it "plainly sophomoric," while a reviewer in Cleveland labeled it "one of the worst books I've ever read." Meanwhile, here in Maine, I've personally encountered both strong enthusiasm for her work and the sense -- especially among those who prefer lobster to jerky -- that Carolyn Chute is not something you discuss in polite company.
Chute chalks it up to the sort of people she writes about. "The only time they [the literary elite] write about working class people, it's, 'My father used to beat me and finally I escaped and got a good education and became a yuppie.' That's the only time . . . It's always about finally becoming a consumer. 'We're so lucky now!'"
She giggles.
Perhaps what has raised eyebrows most is the fact that she doesn't condemn her characters -- a motley group who bum and breed in Maine's bucolic underbelly -- or even keep them at an ironic distance. She celebrates them. Whether it's the Beans ("If it runs, a Bean will shoot it! If it falls, a Bean will eat it!") or Snow Man's Robert Drummond, a Maine militia member who executes a U.S. senator before bedding another senator's wife and daughter, Chute's writing demands, if not always receives, a reader's sympathy.
"[My books] have made the professional-class people in New York very mad because they said things in some of the reviews like, 'She sounds like she's proud to be working class. She doesn't want to be like us. What's the matter with her?'" Chute says. "In fact, there was one reviewer of Beans in The New York Times who kind of caught some of that. She was sharp . . . I thought she was really on to something the way she kept going, 'Chute's nuts.'"
She giggles again.
"Well, I mean she was really on to something because it was so different from her thinking."
January 25, 2024
This is more of a 1 1/2 or 1.75 star book. The best word to describe it is "libertarian fanfic dumpster fire". It feels like a poorly-expanded short story.
Kristy and Connie feel like stereotypes of the "woke liberal woman". Connie in particular reminds me somewhat of a liberal version of Francine from American Dad. Drummond is the libertarian militia's everyman - Chute's "Gary-Stu".
There are glimmers of a an alright story in this, but there's so much fluff as well. So many pointless chapters that add nothing to a story spread thin over too many pages.
Maybe I'll check out Beans of Egypt, Maine (which is supposed to be good) or the one with Wolves in the title (which is supposed to be even worse).
Kristy and Connie feel like stereotypes of the "woke liberal woman". Connie in particular reminds me somewhat of a liberal version of Francine from American Dad. Drummond is the libertarian militia's everyman - Chute's "Gary-Stu".
There are glimmers of a an alright story in this, but there's so much fluff as well. So many pointless chapters that add nothing to a story spread thin over too many pages.
Maybe I'll check out Beans of Egypt, Maine (which is supposed to be good) or the one with Wolves in the title (which is supposed to be even worse).
January 24, 2016
This is a book I had on my shelf forever before reading it and quite truthfully, I preferred it gathering dust.
It is a fairy tale of the right wing militia . The hero assassinates an evil senator and is hailed as a hero even while he is being hunted by the FBI.
He has been injured and he finds safe haven in the home of another senator. He is harbored by the senators wife and daughter and they both lust after him.
His cause is weakly stated, but I suppose the good of the book comes from quite possibly understanding this perspective. I however just shake my head in wonder...or it could be disgust.
It is a fairy tale of the right wing militia . The hero assassinates an evil senator and is hailed as a hero even while he is being hunted by the FBI.
He has been injured and he finds safe haven in the home of another senator. He is harbored by the senators wife and daughter and they both lust after him.
His cause is weakly stated, but I suppose the good of the book comes from quite possibly understanding this perspective. I however just shake my head in wonder...or it could be disgust.
April 19, 2012
I could not be a bigger fan of Carolyn Chute's work, but this one had some major flaws. It is not the political stance of the work that detracted for me, but the massive improbabilities of the plot. Although Chute's remarkable prose is evident in this novel, it was seriously underwritten, with a few ill-conceived conceptual choices. So very glad I didn't read this novel first, as it would have prevented me from picking up any other Carolyn Chute work--and I would have missed out on the amazing Merry Men>.
April 4, 2013
What do you get when you cross a delusional domestic terrorist seeking refuge with delusional, crazy, rich women? This book. I did like the writing style, choppy, slightly crazy; fits right in with the characters. The story line is too far fetched though and does not in any way resemble a reality that could be realized. It was fun though.
February 22, 2015
my first Carolyn Chute. It's a slight book, and a sort of preposterous story, and I'm impressed. She's a really clever, entertaining, pleasurable writer. Want to try more by her. Great little story. Almost like a play.
April 1, 2016
didn't like it. stopped reading.
just couldn't get into it at all and i loved her other books. oh well...
just couldn't get into it at all and i loved her other books. oh well...
August 19, 2016
Pretty good start, pretty good ending, but the middle was repetitive and wanting. Worth reading (at least the first few chapters) because the political setting could have been written today.
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April 4, 2017If I had stopped at about 100 pages in, I would have given this book 5 stars for its beautiful prose and the complexity of the characters' reactions to the situation in which they're placed. The trouble is, as it went on, I began to feel as though I'd wandered into an Ayn Rand novel. It's not that Chute's politics are the same as Rand's, but that the story begins to feel like the ham-handed illustration of a political thesis, and once that happens, the characters and the story cease to be believable.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews