Books: Maine Lines LETOURNEAU’S USED AUTO PARTS

“A fork loader brings the crusher a gored and rusty Rambler. The crusher eats the Rambler. The Rambler doesn’t fight back. It just shivers as it enters the jaws. The windshield pops. The crusher howls lustily. The crusher man working the levers slow and easy has a faraway look in his eye.”

Anthropomorphizing the machine and denaturing the operator have the intended < effect, and there is no doubt that Carolyn Chute writes for effect. Her first novel, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, socked the reader with a collection of country characters that might have escaped the pages of another resident Maine novelist, Stephen King, who does not write nearly so well as Chute but plots better.

The Mainers of Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts are not the type to be seen at L.L. Bean. They live in a town that is inappropriately named Miracle City, a collection of raw shacks and trailers hard by an automobile junkyard whose owner, Lucien Letourneau, is a down-East version of Big Daddy. Chute skillfully spot-welds an assemblage of impressive vignettes and character sketches, but she has difficulty hooking up the narrative drive.