The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols (review)

Reviews 249 speaker’s town. The life of the town is gone in the absent young. And the coyotes wait to move in when “the last / foolishness” is stifled. Milton appears to be striving in these poems for a unification of the vision of two cultures; and I, for one, hope he achieves it as Coyote continues to cry in his future creations. GLENN E. SELANDER, Boise State University The Milagro Beanfield War. By John Nichols. (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1974, 445 pp., $8.95.) John Nichols’ The Milagro Beanfield War is a big novel, in scope, in theme, in sheer bulk. Anyone reading Mr. Nichols’ first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo, a story of two not so star-crossed lovers set in a context of North­ eastern private college life, would have been hard put to anticipate this, his third novel, a sometimes violent, sometimes poignant presentation of social injustice in the Southwest. What does unite the two novels are the author’s flair for grotesque humor and his advocacy of love as a redeeming force in human relations. Like Frank Norris’ The Octopus and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, The Milagro Beanfield War has a basis in actual events, in this instance the struggle in the 1960’s and ’70’s by Hispano-Americans in northern New Mexico to restore ancestral land grants taken from them by the Anglos. There are vital similarities among these novels: the importance of the land both as a means of sustenance and as a condition for establishing a social community, the deterministic power of economic interests to erode and destroy that community and misuse that land, the sense that life is a confused, often desperate struggle that is made bearable by the capacity of those who live it to snatch moments of happiness and to hold on to a dream that something better is possible. In Mr. Nichols’ novel land is important, but the most precious natural substance is water. He who controls water controls life; to realize this fact is to recognize a basic reality of the West. For Steinbeck’s Okies water was a gift that Nature could withhold, but they lived in a marginal Western situation. In the real West water is a constant of a given quantity that the inhabitants have had to learn to conserve and use. Thus Mr. Nichols can attach great actual and symbolic significance to his hero’s assertion of his traditional water rights. The dynamics of the legal struggles of the upper and lower Colorado River states during the last fifty years are not unlike the political dynamics of this novel. 250 Western American Literature This aspect of the novel establishes for it a basic seriousness that helps give stability to a presentation that is episodic, constantly shifting and, like the American humor of the frontier West, may begin with a common reality, but gradually distorts that reality until the reader is left contemplat­ ing an absurdity that is both outrageous and amusing. If this is the situation in which these characters must exist, they are compensated by the gifts of endurance, of an intuitive sense of the appropriate action, an ability to make do with what they have, an affinity for the environment in which they live. They have the qualities of the most important protective spirit in the pantheon which one of the characters describes, the Coyote-Angel. The hope is that they too will not just endure, they will prevail. I have the impression that in The Milagro Beanfield War John Nichols has found himself as an author. It bodes well for his future. MOTLEY DEAKIN, University of Florida The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Cenutry. By Roy W. Meyer. (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1965. 265 pages. $2.45.) The appearance in paperback of Roy W. Meyer’s study of the MidWestern farm novel should help put it where it is most needed, in the college classroom. The journey through a college level U.S. Lit. course, from the intellectual East to the virile West, seldom includes more than three whistle-stops in the barn-yards of the Mid-West; LaCrosse, Northfield and Red...