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...