Carolyn Chute, the voice of the American wilderness

Carolyn Chute is poised to become an unlikely voice for the hard times coming to America. She is already the country's least likely novelist, writing in a vernacular unfiltered by higher education.

Her first effort emerged from the backwoods of Maine in the mid-1980s and her latest, The School of Heart's Content Road, is published by Atlantic Monthly Press this week, to glowing reviews.

At 61, Chute lives in a cabin at the end of a dirt road with a wood stove and an outdoor privy, and without a telephone or computer. Her second husband, Michael, wears plaid shirts, a felt hat and a long white beard.

He is illiterate, although he does like to draw while she pounds the keys of her old typewriter, and he works as an occasional gravedigger and logger.

Chute is best known locally in Parsonsfield, Maine, in the mountains where she has always lived, as the founder and 'offence secretary' of her own off-the-grid Militia, the 2nd Maine, also known as 'Your Wicked Good Militia'.

Chute wrote of foreclosures long before the meltdown made them common

The author carries her Russian AK-47 assault rifle at all times, preferring it to a shotgun because it has a gas cylinder which relieves the kick. "It's very gentle," she says. "Very soft."

It is that voice, which can describe a rifle as "soft", which is attracting attention. She creates characters as raw as they are humane, and shines a light on the poverty and struggle which Americans are suddenly dreading. Chute offers the most powerful portrait of the 'other America' since Faulkner and Steinbeck.

Her first book was The Beans of Egypt, Maine, a saga of a hardscrabble hillbilly clan. "If it runs," she wrote, "a Bean will shoot it. If it falls, a Bean will eat it."