On the advice of, and due to a gift from, the New Jersey correspondent, I just finished reading John Nichols' The Milagro Beanfield War. You may remember this as a very good but little noticed film directed by Robert Redford in the late '80s. I don't believe in the whole "the book is better" thing, but I will tell you that the supporting characters are much more flushed out, and long-term motivations are much clearer in the book.

The basic story is that in the northern New Mexico town of Milagro, most everyone is poor, disenfranchised, and victimized by unfair land and (especially) water laws that have forced them away from subsistence agriculture and largely into service-sector employment or odd jobs. Out of hostility, anger, frustration, or perhaps for no reason at all, one of the townspeople (Joe Mondragon) starts illegally irrigating a beanfield. This makes authorities and a local land developer very nervous, because they don't really want to rile up the locals but they also don't want to risk their investments. Every event comes to be seen in light of the growing tension in town, and eventually a kind of political consciousness starts coming together.

While this might sound dull or propagandistic, Nichols avoids either because the novel is very comic, especially the scenes involving an unwitting VISTA volunteer from New York completely out of his element and prone to horrible luck. What I particularly liked about this book is that, unlike in the previously reviewed Stones for Ibarra, I felt that everyone here was a real character and not just window dressing. Even the politicians and land developers here are not caricatures, but are real people with real interests and with sensitivity and even sympathy for the locals, even though they have decided to work against their interests. The other thing I particularly liked about this book was that it had elements of magical realism, but which erred on the side of the uncanny (unlikely, fortuitous, but ultimately possible)--which I like--as opposed to the downright supernatural--which I have no tolerance for. This book also made me happy because I have been shying away from longer books, but at 456 thick pages I made it through just fine and fairly quickly to boot. So maybe I'm past that aversion for the time being.