Ms. Chute, 61, a wry, direct and earthy woman who favors bandannas, peasant skirts and stout hiking boots, works in their home, which is guarded by a sign that reads: “Woa. Visitors Turn Back.” Neither building is heated, except by wood stove, or has hot water. The compound’s sole toilet is a tin-roofed outhouse.

The Chute home does have an industrial-size copying machine, however, and nearby she keeps her AK-47 rifle, which she likes because it has a gas piston that dampens recoil. “It’s very gentle, very soft,” she said. Ms. Chute, whose fourth novel, “The School on Heart’s Content Road,” comes out on Friday, had a surprise hit in the mid-’80s with her first book, “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” about a hard-luck, occasionally incestuous clan that some critics compared to Faulkner’s Snopeses.

“If it runs, a Bean will shoot it,” she wrote. “If it falls, a Bean will eat it.” The book’s empathy and precise observation derived, it turned out, from personal experience. Ms. Chute, who g