Steinbeck Continued--and Corrected : LONG ROAD HOME <i> by Ronald B. Taylor (Henry Holt: $19.95; 420 pp.)</i>

After “The Grapes of Wrath,” can anyone write again about the Okies, the migrant camps, and the growers of the San Joaquin Valley? Ronald B. Taylor, in a convincing and exciting first novel, shows that it can be done and done with style. Rather than trying to compete with “Grapes,” Taylor builds on it to tell us another, more complicated story which is not exactly a sequel, although Tom Joad enters briefly as a minor character, but an expansion to other scenes and conflicts of the Dust Bowl migration into the factories in the fields.

The central character is once again the family, this time the Robertsons rather than the Joads, who are forced from their home in Texas by the Depression and by a rodeo accident that cripples the father, Ertie. Bessie, his wife, has the same values and iron will of Ma Joad, but Ertie is tougher, more determined than Pa although he too feels the discouragement of homelessness and the frustration of being scorned as an Okie. This gun-toting ex-cowboy gives a whole new dimension of Western pride to the migrant drama.

The dominant point of view, however, is that of one of the children, 15-year-old Jake, who grows up quickly under the pressure of back-breaking work, discrimination, and strike battles with the growers. Taylor must remember his teen-age years well, for I have seldom encountered in a novel a young boy treated with as much understanding and realism. His doubts, his sudden enthusiasms, his passionate attachment to his family, his temper, and his sexuality (which may shock some readers) all contribute to a portrait that, living and breathing, carries us pell-mell through troubling encounters--love, hate and desperate action--to a satisfying, yet believable, conclusion.

Paralleling the story of Jake and his family is that of Titus Wardlow, the ambitious and overbearing big farmer. As a type, Wardlow will ring true to California readers who have seen developer after developer bulldoze his way over county boards of supervisors and community sentiments in order to make his millions.

But there is something a bit too reminiscent of “Dallas” and “Dynasty” in this plot of the cigar-smoking ex-World War I aviator, his snooty wife and his cat-like girlfriend, although some will find pleasure in the air race sequences, which feature Wardlow and his mistress, who is also a pilot.

The Robertsons begin their California sojourn by working for Wardlow’s farm, picking peaches, and are treated like dirt. Not only are they paid in tokens good only at the company store, they are shorted on their work tally. When they object, Wardlow personally sees that the “troublemakers” are fired. As the family moves on through several years of barely surviving the rigors of the road and subsistence wages, they encounter both helpful people and hostile--small farmers, nurses, teachers, travel camp managers--and they begin, with almost superhuman effort, to get a bit ahead and put money down on a “house”--an old railroad box car divided into rooms--nothing like the house they left in Texas.

As the novel comes to its climax, the Robertsons and Wardlow come into conflict once again, this time in a huge cotton strike. The stakes on each side are success or ruin, although the scale is quite different. For the Robertsons, the fight is for dignity and the chance to own their own house, such as it is, and start a new life; for Wardlow, the fight is to preserve his ambitious dream of a gigantic cotton plantation, against which he has put everything he owns into hock. Near the end, the antagonists come face to face, and it is Jake who plays the crucial role.

Taylor is particularly suited to tell this story. Born and reared in the San Joaquin Valley, he worked there for more than two decades as a reporter and writer of nonfiction books, an expert on farm labor. Natives and longtime Californians will delight in his details. Anyone who can remember the Giant Orange stands along Highway 99 or Blackwell Corners (a service station in the middle of nowhere on the West Side which used to charge for water, in the days when radiators demanded water), has my vote as California writer of the year.

Taylor also knows his history, although he changes things around a bit, and his people. His Okies seem to me to have a truer dialect than Steinbeck’s and his San Joaquin (which Steinbeck did not know all that well) more color and variety. He shows us that the migrants were black and brown, as well as white (something that Steinbeck omits). He gives us the grower “line” (“these people don’t want to strike--it’s all the work of outside agitators”) and yet shows us, despite the almost stereotyped Wardlow, that growers were people too. Building on our familiarity with an old classic, Taylor does not surpass it artistically, but he does tell a gripping story that has artistic dimensions. On this 50th anniversary of the publication of “The Grapes of Wrath,” at a time when we once again worry about the homeless, Taylor’s “Long Road Home” comes as a worthy postscript, poignantly reminding us, as did the original, of our common humanity.