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."

The new novel - Chute hopes to write a series of five around the same large cast of characters - moves the action a few miles down the road to a 'settlement' described as "a statewide co-operative in furniture, alternative energies, farm produce and trade", run by a man who is part 'prophet' and part militia-leader, who takes in two abandoned children.

The New York Times book reviewer declared Chute such an "extraordinary, vivid, emphatic writer that it would be tempting to swoon into the love and overlook the bullets." That, the critic added, would only "dim the considerable power here: if the despair and the tenderness are real, so are the guns".

Chute sometimes breaks the narrative to turn straight to the reader in quirky asides. "Today, somewhere in America, more foreclosures. More auctions. Another farmer plots his own death. And another. There is an art to making your death by combine look like an accident." This was written well before financial meltdown made "foreclosure" a word in the daily headlines.

In 1996, she went to Washington bearing signs saying Smash Corporate Tyranny

Chute has described her life as "sort of like a living novel". Both the militia and the poverty are real. The 2nd Maine - "libertarians, greens, guys in camo," she explains, jovially, "white supremacists, hippies off the land, anarchists, people from Communist organisations" - meets behind her cabin to shoot tin cans and plan protests.

In 1996, she led them into the State Capitol bearing placards reading Smash Corporate Tyranny, her husband at her side dressed in his Revolutionary War uniform.

The incident, of course, becomes a chapter in The School on Heart's Content Road. And the struggle to survive is on every page. "We're poor, and we lead a very different kind of life," she says. "Your community is your survival." The country seems to be ready to hear from her "other America". ·