The Nirvana Blues

The seventies are over. All across America, the overgrown kids of the middle class are getting their acts together—and getting older. The once-tight Chicano community of Chamisaville is long gone, and the Anglo power brokers control almost everything. Joe Miniver—faithful husband, loving father, and all-around good guy—is about to sink roots. To buy the land he wants, he dreams up a coke scam that will net him the necessary bread. Joe is also about to embark on a series of erotic adventures with three headstrong women, bringing him face-to-face with the terrors (and absurdity) of the modern man-woman scene.

This final volume in the New Mexico trilogy, like its predecessors, is a lusty, visionary novel that blends comedy and tragedy, reality and fantasy, tenderness and bite, to illuminate some very troubling truths about America—truths no less pointed and accurate today than they were twenty years ago.

John Nichols is the author of nine novels and six works of nonfiction. He lives in Northern New Mexico.