Letourneau's Used Auto Parts

Format:

Book

Title:

Letourneau's Used Auto Parts

Author:

Chute, Carolyn.

ISBN:

9780899195001

Publication Information:

New York : Ticknor & Fields, 1988.

Physical Description:

244 pages ; 22 cm

Contents:

Crowe Bovey's burning gold -- Leaving Freddie -- Springtime in Miracle City -- Gallows humor -- The crusher -- Blackstone's baby -- The man of gold.

Summary:

Chute digs back again into the roots of the characters of his first novel, the Beanses, a nest of redneck Yankees who give a new meaning to the concept of white trash. With the help of cameo appearances from several Beanses, the nuclear family Letourneau gives Egypt's first family more than a run for their money in wackiness, eccentricity, and sheer ignorant bliss in the face of an overwhelming and fatally depressing lifestyle. Chute captures all of these people down to a tee, and in the process makes this economically depressed, sexually overactive and spiritually torpid place a real presence on the map. In a junkyard approach, Chute throws in whatever is handy or whatever she has managed to dredge up from some unspeakably dim and dirty corner of the human psyche. ISBN 0-89919-500-8: $16.95.

Subject(s):

Automobile wrecking and used parts industry -- Maine -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Genre:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Amity Public Library	FIC CHUTE	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

The author of the bestseller The Beans of Egypt, Maine brilliantly captures the vicious circle of poverty as well as the humanity that binds people together in this bittersweet novel set in a small town in Maine.

Author Notes

A high school dropout at age 16, Carolyn Chute has been described as a shy, genial woman with idiosyncratic political views. Almost immediately after dropping out of school, Chute married and had a daughter. After the marriage ended in divorce, Chute held a variety of low-paying jobs, including driving a school bus, working on a potato farm, and plucking chickens to support herself and her child.

In 1978, Chute completed high school and began taking classes at the University of Maine. While attending college, Chute started writing stories, and eventually had her work published in area magazines. Chute's first novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, published in 1986, details what it was like growing up in a poverty-stricken town. The characters and setting of her successful first novel were continued in Letourneau's Used Auto Parts (1988) and Merry Men (1994).

A member of the 2nd Maine Militia, Chute is lobbying for several causes. Among the causes are limiting campaign contributions to $100 per citizen, extending the right of free speech and assembly to work-sites and shopping malls, banning lobbyists from the political process, and limiting the number of newspapers or magazines that can be owned by any single corporation to one.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

The impoverished citizenry of Miracle City, Maine, rely on Big Lucien Letourneau, the proprietor of an auto salvage junkyard, for jobs and assistance of all kinds. Chute's ``compassion for people condemned to dead-end lives infuses this powerful novel with universal meaning,'' maintained PW . (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Review

From the earthy author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1984): seven more stories of life in that bleak little burg, this time centering--with rather less force or humor--on the immense, loosely extended Letourneau family. The head of this clan--""Big Lucien,"" a small yet virile man with a ""heart of gold"" when it comes to finding room in his makeshift trailer-park for stray relatives--appears only sporadically here, leaving center-stage to assorted kinfolk and employees, In ""Leaving Freddie,"" we meet Lucien's ex-wife #3, Lillian, who desperately marries born-again, tattooed Vietnam-vet Gene Babbidge--violent father often by his first wife--and immediately regrets it; meanwhile, Lillian's teen-age daughter Junie tries to find some distinctive place in this overpopulated household--as a budding entrepreneur (selling fortunes) and seductive stepsister. Two other stories also feature the Babbidges. In ""Callows Humor,"" Gene's half-brother Ernie--a flashy, semi-famous, but broke and suicidal country-music singer--comes for a visit, while Junie and her stepfather surrender to lust amid parked cars. (""His passion is hardly distinguishable from his familiar and constant rage."") And in ""Blackstone's Baby,"" a miserably pregnant Junie finds peculiar comfort with Letourneau employee Crowe Bovey, a macho man addicted to guns and killing but (like most of Chute's men) a silent sufferer. Elsewhere, the focus comes closer to the Letourneau household itself. In ""Springtime in Miracle City,"" Big Lucien's 30-year-old son Norman--a dour, scruffy bachelor--halfheartedly (to put it mildly) stumbles into an affair with his lather's ex-wife #2, aging hippie Eve; Norman's mother Maxine, meanwhile, lakes up belligerent residence in the overcrowded trailer park. And, in ""The Crusher,"" Big Lucien's pathetic nephew Severin faces eviction (with wife and kids) while waiting for Letourneau's Used Auto Parts to get solvent enough-via the crushing of old cars into scrap metal--to pay him some back salary. Like The Beans of Egypt, Maine, this assemblage of vignettes bristles with convincingly grimy details, vividly brutish dialogue, and downbeat irony. But, while the earlier book was shrewdly held together by a strongly sympathetic central figure (sometime-narrator Earlene Pomerleau). the effect here--especially since Chute's prose seems less taut this time around--is often amorphous and disjointed, with only occasional stretches of fully involving storytelling. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

"The immediacy of the prose evokes in startling clarity the amoral jumble of passions and the suffering of characters' whole lives seem at once so different and yet so much like our own," said LJ's reviewer (LJ 6/15/88) of this follow-up to Chute's first novel, The Beans of Egypt Maine (LJ 3/15/87). (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.