CARRYING WATER AS A WAY OF LIFE: A HOMESTEADER’S HISTORY, by Linda Tatelbaum, About Time Press, Appleton, Maine, 1997, 117 pages, $9.95.

On the back of Linda Tatelbaum’s new book, “Carrying Water as a Way of Life: A Homesteader’s History,” is a revelation. It reads: “When Linda Tatelbaum and her husband headed `back-to-the-land’ in 1977 to build a solar house and raise their food in Maine, they found the simple life more complex then they ever imagined.”

Oh really? Most people born and raised in Maine (Tatelbaum is from New York) will be shaking their heads at this, already knowing how difficult it is here even with the creature comforts of electricity, oil heat and running water. I was almost tempted to dismiss the book as yuppie trash, another romanticized version of “The Way Life Should Be,” but when I read on to learn that Tatelbaum’s essays would be “lyrical, wry, and feisty,” I couldn’t resist the urge to be wry and feisty myself. That’s right, I bought the book with a swipe of my ATM card and went home for a spirited afternoon’s read.

If only my halogen lamp had blown a fuse …

It is with her resume, not with a spade or with a shovel or even with an organically grown beet, that Tatelbaum begins her foray into the world of transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau. From the start, she tells us she is an educated woman (B.A., M.A., Ph.D. from Cornell University) and that her exile is self-imposed. That knowledge takes a lot of punch out of words that quickly come off as so much whining. The problem here is that the author’s struggle can never be taken as seriously as that of someone whose economic circumstances are dire. Now an associate professor of English at Colby College, she and her husband saved their money, bought 75 acres in Maine, planted a garden, and started building their solar house with “only hand tools.” Her diary entries — overwritten, melodramatic and ultimately comical — speak volumes:

8/20 Twice in the last two days we’ve been howling from the roof peak for failure and anguish and lack of a good reason why we are stuck with this experience which we’ve carved out for ourselves. How I hate the house for being there exactly as I plotted it on the graph paper, only different in ways I could not foretell and wish were not.

9/5 Labor Day, spent canning corn on the Coleman stove in the a.m. and wandering aimlessly but contentedly through the house. Now here I am, writing dutifully in my notebook. The “3 sentences” I’ve assigned myself feel like so many words. Serving my sentences.

9/8 Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

10/1 I feel so frustrated with these house-finishing details that I walk off into the woods, thinking if I go far enough I will disappear and not have to deal with my life any more. But it dosen’t work that way.

It certainly doesn’t, but it is difficult to feel much sympathy for a woman who willingly gave up modern conveniences for something “simpler,” regardless of her reasons or her good intentions (in this case “defending the land and insisting it is not a commodity”). As I read “Carrying Water,” I did find essays of merit (especially the one about developers), but ultimately I found myself thinking about the economic reality of so many Mainers, and always knew that if Tatelbaum chose to, she had the sound education to escape to a better world … something so many Maine people are unable to do.

The question now is simple: Where does this book fit in the dialogue of Maine literature? What Linda Tatelbaum has done is to give voice to the transcendentalist, something needed and welcomed. What she has not done is to adopt a style of writing that conveys in tone and in word choice the simplicity the transcendentalist seeks. More often than not, the reader is plunged into melodrama, which ultimately serves only to complicate, not simplify. One hopes if she chooses to publish future memoirs, she will adopt a style of writing that is less cloying.

Chris Smith is a free-lance writer who lives in Brewer.