BOOK REVIEW : No Happy Endings in Coal Mining Tale : THE UNQUIET EARTH, <i> by Denise Giardina,</i> Norton, $22.95; 366 pages

So. Communism has been vanquished in the Soviet Union and capitalism would appear to reign supreme.

And yet, as long as capitalism rules, there will always be a few nagging novelists who relentlessly point out the downside: that an industrial system that still subsists in great part by coal, for instance, will, by nature, generate coal miners. And that although executives and middle management of coal mining operations live rather well, coal miners who live in coal camps will fare rather badly, as will their wives and children.

And although our President visited the Earth Summit in Rio and signed certain treaties that protect the environment, in favor of “jobs, jobs, jobs,” there will always be a few stubborn novelists who interpret, by the use of pure story, another version of that text.

Strip miners, for instance, do not strip mine because they love the working class. They do it because they want to get richer and show a higher profit margin. If the environment begins to look, smell and feel a little strange, well, that’s the breaks. Laissez faire, OK? Hold out your chipped cup for something to trickle down, and try dosing that pesky black lung with some cough medicine from the Company Store.

Denise Giardina grew up in a coal camp. Her cool sentences and engrossing narration have nothing to do with the febrile ditherings of the professional propagandist. She’s just telling the story, evidently, of where and how she grew up. The geographical place of her new novel, “The Unquiet Earth,” is the creeks, valleys, mountains and hollows of Kentucky and West Virginia.

The family of her hero, Dillon Freeman, had a “home place” in Kentucky once. They have long since lost it. They live now--as miners--in camp No. 13, one of a string of dirt-poor, unhealthy, hopeless coal camps along Blackberry Creek in West Virginia.

Dillon loves his first cousin, Rachel Honaker, who, afraid to marry a first cousin, instead chooses Tony Angelelli, a man of bad character. She is rescued from a terrible domestic situation by Arthur Lee Sizemore, a county commissioner who gives her the job of public health nurse. (All this action occurs during World War II and in the early ‘50s.)

Sizemore occupies a thankless position in this hideously unjust society. He is the flunky of the bosses. He skims money off the top of every little project that comes under his hand. He becomes the richest of the poor and the poorest of the rich and is hated and scorned by both classes.

The landscape has its own heroes and villains. The mine is, of course, a death trap. Trace Mountain is a beautiful, sentient, natural refuge--until the strip miners get to it. And a smoking, putrid mountain of slate that the bosses carelessly pile up against the natural contours of Blackberry Creek evolves from an eyesore into a monster that threatens the life of every person in this novel.

Giardina writes about the brave lives of people--Dillon and Rachel, their families, friends and their love child--all of whom happen to be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, with--God knows--the wrong set of job opportunities.

This is the kind of novel people call “uncompromising.” There isn’t any happy ending here. Because there’s nothing in the social contract of pure capitalism that says the workers are going to get a rose garden.

The Rose Garden goes to somebody else.