In Egypt, Maine, it's pretty hard to turn over a log without unearthing a Bean; they're just everywhere. For the Beans have always been there. Almost everybody's related to them, some more closely than you might wish. It's birth and copulation and death--and then more of the same. — Earlene Pomerleau isn't a Bean; no, probably not, but she's squa...   more 籸e in the middle of the swarming hive. There's Cousin Rubic, a boozer and brawler, who can't quite keep himself out of jail; Aunt Roberta, who is in a perpetual state of pregnancy and encirclement by as nasty a litter of no-neck monsters as you have run across since Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and Beal, who is sweet and gentle but violent in defeat. In this, her first full-length work, Carolyn Chute writes of poverty from ground level. The poverty is grinding, its victims wrestling manically for survival. If Chute's method is primitive, it could not be otherwise for she is dealing with primitive matters. If she laughs, she laughs with her people for she shares their lot. The Beans may recall Faulkner's Snopes family, and there's a pinch of Erskine Caldwell here, too. But Carolyn Chute owes no real debts. She is her own woman.   ?less