LUSH LANGUAGE : Desert Heat : SO FAR FROM GOD<i> By Ana Castillo (W. W. Norton: $19.95; 256 pp.) </i>

“So Far From God” could be the offspring of a union between “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “General Hospital”: a sassy, magical, melodramatic love child who won’t sit down and--the reader can only hope--will never shut up.

This delightful novel is the third from Ana Castillo, who won an American Book Award for “The Mixquiahuala Letters,” and like much of her other work it is set in the cultural borderlands of the U.S. Southwest. Castillo’s terrain is not the New Mexico that recently had its 15 minutes of fame in trendy galleries; it is the enduring land of enchantment, of curanderas and Pueblo rain dances, of drought-stricken chile fields and a Spanish-speaking people whose tenure on that land precedes the arbitrary titles of “United States” and even “Mexico.” It is also a land of modern complications: polluted canals, food stamps, unemployment and wide-screen TVs, which promise so much more, and so much less, than real life has to offer.

“So Far From God” is the story of the matriarch Sofi, her wayward husband Domingo (“That marriage had a black ribbon on its door from the beginning”) and their four daughters, none of whom is ever more than two steps away from God, the grave or some catastrophe involving a man. The youngest, La Loca, dies on Page 1 and promptly undergoes a dramatic resurrection, but is never quite right again; she spends her life shunning people in favor of the company of animals and the visitations of sundry dead relatives. The eldest sister, Esperanza, first and only member of her family to go through college, earns a master’s in communications and becomes a newscaster; but she finds that these accomplishments plunge her into “transitional years where she felt like a woman with brains was as good as dead for all the happiness it brought her in the love department.”

Caridad, the beauty, is equally unlucky in the love department, though tending toward the opposite extreme: “At about the time that her sister, who was definitely not prettier . . . but for sure had more brains, was on the 10 o’clock nightly news, you could bet that Caridad was making it in a pickup off a dark road with some guy whose name the next day would be as meaningless to her as yesterday’s headlines were to Esperanza la newscaster.”

Even the “normal” sister, Fe, known to all as an efficient and hard-working employee of the Savings and Loan, falls into a year-long screaming trance after returning one day from her fitting at Bernadette’s Bridal Gowns to find a “Dear Juana” letter from her fiance. Like a good telenovela --a Mexican soap opera--the plot of this novel meanders at breakneck pace as each sister moves toward her disastrous, glorious and highly individual destiny.

The chapter titles alone are a worthy read: Chapter 12, for example, is called “Of the Hideous Crime of Francisco el Penitente, and His Pathetic Calls Heard Throughout the Countryside as His Body Dangled from a Pinon like a Crow-Picked Pear; and the End of Caridad and Her Beloved Emerald, Which We Nevertheless Will Refrain from Calling Tragic.”

It’s a fact that a good deal is given away by the table of contents, but finding out who lives or dies here is not exactly the point. The story is driven by such a charming and jocular voice, it’s simply a joy ride to follow along as the narrative strays down one side road after another, offering the reader practical advice, ever-useful miracle cures, and recipes for wedding cookies.

By far the most entertaining character here (and that is saying a lot) is the narrator herself, who is never identified, but who sounds like some sort of omniscient nosy neighbor--perhaps La Senora God. Anonymous though she is, the narrator does not refrain from expressing opinions about everything, from the dangers of nuclear power to the foolhardiness of allowing husbands to have the last word. One of the later chapters is bluntly entitled, “La Loca Santa Returns to the World via Albuquerque Before Her Transcendental Departure; and a Few Random Political Remarks from the Highly Opinionated Narrator.”

The ingenuous tone works a miracle here, for it never feels any more pointed than the spicy lectures of a beloved, batty grandmother--but in fact the “Political Remarks” are not random at all. As Sofi and her remarkable daughters keep us swooning with high drama, the subtext of the story lays out the terms of brutal poverty and discrimination that confront Hispanic and indigenous people in the rural Southwest. Castillo’s characters are caught between two cultures: an old one that is both reverent and exploitative of women; and a new one that views them mainly as a cheap labor force to be used up and abandoned. Sofi’s daughters are touched poignantly by miracles, occupational illness, sainthood and boyfriend problems, and, to their eternal credit, they never seem to take the easy way out.

Like Sandra Cisneros’s acclaimed “House on Mango Street” and “Woman Hollering Creek,” Castillo’s writing is seasoned with Mexican aphorisms and the rich symbolism of a culture whose pantheon includes the Virgin Mary, Pancho Villa and Aztec goddesses. With her unabashed prescriptions for social change, however, Castillo has taken her subject a step farther into the domain of North American magic realism, a tentative genre descended from the politically astute masterpieces of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, and placed surely on our own map by the likes of John Nichols and Linda Hogan.

“So Far From God” is one of the most engaging contributions yet, distinguishing itself from its South American predecessors by its chatty, accessible Norteno language and relentless good humor. Give it to people who always wanted to read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” but couldn’t quite get through it. This one has levitating children and birds dropping out of the sky, too, but it’s as readable as a teen-aged sister’s secret diary--and as impossible to resist.