John Sayles's Union Dues is a disturbingly well-written novel. I'll begin by praising the book's obvious merits, before I deal with what disturbs me so much about it.

The plot in itself should guarantee reasonable interest. A miner's son, Hobie McNatt, runs away from his home in desolate West Virginia coal country, in search (he thinks) of his older brother Dar, a burnt-out Vietnam veteran. He comes to Boston where he falls in with one of the "revolutionary collectives" that proliferated during the late 1960s. His father, Hunter McNatt, reluctantly leaves his buddies in Joseph Yablonski's insurgency against the United Mine Workers' Boyle machine to look for his son in the Brave New World of the Boston-Cambridge axis circa 1968–69: a good mix of materials—working-class hero meets the New Left.

Fortunately, Sayles is too serious and skillful a writer to succumb to the temptations of the facile and topical. He manages to create a compelling American tragedy, the dissolution of a family, and then to extend it to our nation's desperate search for lasting roots and personal ties. This theme is suggested on the book's first page with the description of a strip-mined hillside Hobie sees on his way out of town: "The trees were all gray up by the dozer-scraped highwall, tilted at crazy angles with their roots poking out into space." As the book continues, the theme takes root and spreads….

Sayles, a Williams graduate who has worked at several blue-collar jobs, has written a realistic novel of working-class life. He understands the petty but intensely personal politics of the shop floor and the union local. He captures the physical sensations of moderately hard menial labor and he has an uncanny ear for the dialogue of diverse working-class subcultures….

Hunter McNatt is a brilliantly wrought character, but Sayles is considerably less kind to the middle-class radicals who appear in his narrative. He captures their Movement jargon and their presumptions in devastating dialogue. (p. 408)

No one who was involved in the political activism of the 1960s will read this book without feeling a twinge of embarrassed nostalgia. The professional revolutionaries' blatant manipulation of their working-class "clients" is at once repulsive and realistic, and their attempts to relate to working people are often downright ludicrous. Sayles is good at this sort of satire, but the book's real strength lies in its portrayal of working-class life. Union Dues is, quite simply, the best book of its kind since Harvey Swados's On the Line. In many ways it is better than Swados's classic novel of the men of the assembly line. Its scope is much broader, Sayles has a better developed sense of humor and irony and, finally, Union Dues is more concrete and less analytical, relying more on incident and dialogue and less on an omniscient narrator to tell its story.

Nevertheless there is something deeply disturbing about this book, a misleading perspective it conveys to its readers. Literary critics generally argue that a novel should not be judged by its social "message," if indeed it is uncouth enough to have one. But Sayles's book, whether intentionally or not, bears an unmistakable message about political people and the very nature of political involvement.

I raise the question of intention because Sayles himself is not entirely judgmental toward most of the middle-class radicals he portrays. A songfest scene shows them able to laugh at their own political and moral pretensions, and an examination of one radical couple's motivations seems to absolve many of the book's New Left characters of insincerity and bad faith.

But these qualifications will be lost on many readers. (pp. 408-09)

In the eternal tension between the private and the public, the personal and the political, Sayles opts entirely for the private and the personal. He begins with the valid point that people are generally at their most effective when acting on behalf of people they know intimately, rather than for abstract ideas, causes, or faceless classes of people. Hunter joins the anti-Boyle movement not primarily out of concern for his fellow miners but for his son, whom he expects to join him in the mines. But when Hobie runs away, the rank-and-file insurgency "wasn't enough" for Hunter anymore. "There has to be something in it for me, something personal," he tells a fellow miner, "or it's not worth staying for. With Hobie gone I'd feel like an outsider, my heart just wouldn't be in it." When he is forced to recognize that his family is broken up beyond his power to bring it back together, Hunter forges new family ties with a South Boston woman and her children. Sayles's vision of apolitical bliss, as embodied in their new relationship, is appealing and persuasive, but also a bit deceptive.

Most people who have been able to maintain lifelong commitments to social change are people who have found a workable balance in their lives between their personal and political needs. In ignoring the need for such a balance, in implicitly but unmistakably counseling a return to privatism, Sayles is just as narrow at his own extreme as the "political heavies" of the 1960s who preached the complete denial of one's personal feelings in the service of impersonal ideological goals. (p. 409)