Plying an Empty Radicalism

...Marge P Superwoman has written a cheerleader's pep-talk to her loyal cadre "For the street and alley soldiers " Who are we, then, to judge the product by ordinary, bourgeois literary standards...

...attractive, lying on his back with a big grin " "She wanted to entice Joel, her lover, she wanted to parade to and fro [not 'back and forth,' mind you] looking sumptuous ' On the whole, what is supposed to pass for honesty in Marge Piercy's book, in both sexual and political matters, turns out, on closer inspection, to be a routine application of "liberated" attitudes to her characters and situation The passages that ring true do so because of obsessively observed details Frequently they are those that begin, "He wore She wore He was wearing " For a liberated woman Vida carries around a large ballast of bourgeois tastes, along with "her Altman's credit card " From a writer who has published six volumes of verse, one might expect a closer attention to language Piercy for tures adjectives out of nouns, as in "his misfortunate mother," and turns nouns into verbs She is also guilty of unwittingly grotesque oxymorons "She could never rush but must ooze circumspectly toward the rendezvous " The sloppiness of its style betrays the book's underlying sloppiness of thought Unhke Nadine Gordimer's Conservationist and Burger's Daughter, or V S Naipaul's Guerillas, other recent novels that deal with political activism out of a deep concern for human rights, Piercy's book fails to scrutinize either ends or means Moreover, it totally lacks a sense of history Without this, without a sense of the limitations of human endeavor, there is no nobility in suffering or sacrifice That is why the cheering sounds that ring through Marge Piercy's pages have such a hollow echo...

...Vida—also known as Vinme or, from college days, Rosa (for Rosa Luxemburg, of course)—is married for most of the book to Leigh "Leigh, who wanted the very best wine, the best sturgeon, but would not care if he ate them [sic] on the floor He liked to combine high-bourgeois tastes with proletarian preferences Leigh, who loved to live in an atmosphere of music " When we meet him in the present, Leigh has given up political broadcasting for "human interest" interviewing He has a new agent, and a new wife Wildly jealous of the new wife, Vida nonetheless falls passionately in love with a newcomer to the troupe, Joel (whose jealousy of Leigh she cannot comprehend) Joel is younger than Vida, because "the men our age won't change with us, won't let go of the old privileges,' but they are both fugitives, alone together "in a world they never made " Joel has the advantage of being a no-nonsense person with a sense of humor, a quality notably lacking among Vida's colleagues-in-arms, yet he has no purpose beyond mere survival Vida will try to politicize him, to give the two of them "common tasks and shared goals ' Their first task is to transport "a battered woman married to a cop" to a secret hideaway For money Two hundred dollars, to be exact As for their goals, "We have to figure out what we're going to do If we want to work on opposition to nuclear power plants, we have to hammer out some kind of proposal " This feverish search for worthy causes would be comical if it were not woefully symptomatic of the unrootedness of the time Like Dieter Kunzelmann, a member of West Germany's Kommune I in the '60s, Vida's male followers seem to be saying, "I do not study, I do not work, I have trouble with my orgasm, and I wish the public to be informed of this " Eventually, the public was?through multiple bombings and other revolutionary acts which presumably cured Herr Kunzelmann of his Problem But Joel has not yet achieved this consummation "Joel had come in on the tail-end, so he didn't know the wine-tart pleasure of believing you could act and change things and go ahead The act as theater, the act as pure joy The act as collective art, improvised and sensual " (Shades of Mar-metti's futurist esthetics "the new architecture of smoke-spirals from burning villages ") But there is more, and worse Vida says, "Her terror standing in the store had been that something would go wrong and they would kill someone who was not their enemy " Even Ul-nke Meinhof, at least for a good part of her tragic career, had moral qualms about killing in general, not just about killing an "enemy " Besides Vida, Leigh and Joel, a dozen or so other characters flit through the pages, playing their parts vociferously and predictably Of the women, only Vida's half-sister, Natalie, comes to life Despite her feminist sloganeering, she's real, she's decent, even endearing when she chews her fingers There's nothing pretentious about her There is much sex between the acts (or acts between the sex, depending on how you wish to see it) and much palaver in the treatment of it "Kevin was fatally [fatally...

...Plying an Empty Radicalism Vida By Marge Piercy Summit 412 pp $12 95 Reviewed by Betty Falkenberg Contributor, "Partisan Review" Halfway through Marge Piercy's new novel, we are told "Oscar kept the rifle as a proof of his seriousness, as a talisman against co-optation, a fate they all worried about " Co-optation is an infelicitous word here Vida is published by Summit Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, which is a subsidiary of Gulf and Western Corporation, and we can assume that its author is worrying about her own "fate" —all the way to the bank Vida is a novel about the '60s and '70s Moving back and forth in time —from the present to 1967, '70 and '74—in a skittish fashion, it covers the political events of those years from the "vantage" point of a radical feminist leader of underground activities These include a lot of random sex along with a lot of random bombings (and workshops in that explosive art) " 'We might as well bomb something,' Kevin said reasonably " ("Reasonably...

...Vida, as her name suggests, is a model of primitive, ?--vitality "She felt like Wonder Woman streaking through the city " So, in fact, she all too often sounds But then, why not...