THE RECIPE FOR REVOLUTION

Third volume in Chute’s blistering series about the Settlement, a radical, politically incorrect collective of the disorderly and disaffected in rural Maine.

The Settlement revolves around "Prophet” Gordon St. Onge, who rails against corporations, the media, and the war machine; he also has 19 “wives,” even more guns, and a friendly relationship with several right-wing militias. However, although the novel takes place from 1990 to 2000, the election of Donald Trump has clearly prompted its author to do some thinking about her previous willingness to declare her characters “no-wing." Chute is at pains to have Gordon denounce “Republican bullshit” and “so-called Christians” to his militia buddies, and she’s backed off her previous contempt for middle-class progressives; Settlement residents form a relationship of wary mutual respect with a group of left-wing grassroots organizers. Nonetheless, Gordon’s and his author’s hearts are always with “the poor, meek, dishonored, deformed, disheartened, and displaced,” and Chute makes it brutally clear that until the left gets over its distaste for “redneck[s]” and poor whites who refuse to be manipulated by racists, the same people will keep running the world. (The sexual power of teenage girls is another third-rail topic she fearlessly tackles.) The action here runs parallel to events in The School on Heart’s Content Road (2008) and Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves (2014) but spotlights different people from her vast cast of characters. Fifteen-year-old Brianna Vandermast, newest of the wives, emerges as the leader of the Settlement’s younger generation; their end run around Gordon toward even more radical dissent drives what there is of a plot. A manifesto and a mass rally prompt increasingly menacing government harassment and a warning of more nefarious deeds to come from corporate CEO Bruce Hummer, his conscience apparently pricked by his rapidly growing cancers. A few juicy personal conflicts keep the novel from devolving entirely into a political tract—but then again, Chute’s fierce political vision has always been the most interesting thing about her work.

Messy, confrontational, way too long—and essential reading.