A Child of Her Times

...The story breaks off and the narrator explains her refusal to continue "If it were even a couple of years ago I would write this scene, but if I do so now, with the anti-woman forces rich and powerful, desperate young girls, desperate middle-aged women, all the victims of rape, incest, battering far more numerous than any of us like to believe, all the women who simply do not agree to catching a baby as you might catch the flu or pneumonia, would be tempted to do as I did I cannot include a recipe for an action that is too likely to kill you " The soapbox showmanship here notwithstanding, one wishes that the older Jill asserted her presence more often That she does so only for isolated moments constitutes both the dramatic tension and failure of this novel The adult Jill does occasionally seem to parody the seriousness of her adolescence, but not loudly or forcefully enough to either applaud, indict, or smile at her young self We never discover whether the distance of 20 years has altered her conviction that robbery, sleeping with the buddy of one'scousm's rapist andpetty theft are all permissible in the name of survival, love of women, art We simply are informed that the narrator is still "herself," having found enough answers to achieve and insure success, satisfaction and peaceful domesticity We stand like beggars in view of her feast, wondering how she ever got where she is In the end, voyeunsm and tension carry the novel Although some scenes evolve fluidly and commandingly (the robbery scene, for example, where Pier-cy demonstrates the craft that made her earlier Vida such a success), others proceed clumsily, accompanied by stilted dialogue The author frequently demonstrates her painterly eye for detail and rendering, yet her images?silence steaming in midfloor like a pile of freshly dropped horse dung"—often lack subtlety Ignoring critical sensibility, she apparently dismisses that as a shibboleth of the wealthy, white, male literary establishment, the fatuous critics and professors who dismiss her poetry as "uterine devoid of thrust " In defending herself against a critic of her college poetry, the young Jill inadvertently anticipates my attitude toward Piercy's novel, with its raw, unexamined verisimilitude "He knows they are bad by every criteria we are taught, yet when he finishes lashing me with the scorn informed by our common education in English honors, the poems still stand there They are raw, they are often too long They are real as potatoes ' The same is true of Braided Lives?union unately...

...Am I an L?" she writes in her journal Her attempts to answer these questions and establish her poetry dominate Jill's life in college, where she rooms with Donna, her cousin and "conspirator" "We are poor, we are on scholarships, we are ill-dressed, we take the hard courses, we come from the wrong cities and addresses, we will not be rushed by sororities On the rest of the corridor, respectability is counted in the number of cashmere sweater sets or boyfriends with Greek addresses a virtuous girl keeps under or near but not on her bed You go nine tenths of the way and get pinned " The girls become adept at shoplifting and stealing from other students to better their own disadvantaged status Jill sets the vaguely "political" ground rules "We can only rob girls whose wash reveals their class to be very affluent " They also set about relationships with one heartless man after another Donna is raped, Jill's first lover, Mike, is a sadistic poet of violence who gets her pregnant, spills her secrets and leaves her so shaken she develops " anemia, colitis, eczema, toothache" (toothache...

...A Child of Her Times Braided Lives By Marge Piercy Simon & Schuster 480 pp $14 95 Reviewed by Maureen Foley JILL STUART, the narrator of Marge Piercy's latest novel, is a successful poet who lives contentedly with her lover, Josh She enjoys modest critical renown, nurtures her garden and cats, and revels in the knowledge that, despite having been "wildly shaken by divorce,' she is still "herself and leads a "busy swarming life " Jill has chosen, however, not to guide us "like tourists into the bazaar" of her rich, full present, but through the "burned-over district" of her past, "when I became the woman I have somehow in all weathers and colors of luck remained " The choice is regrettable, the mature person surely would be more interesting Jill grew up bright and streetwise in Detroit, daughter of a Welshman who treated his emotions like "rats in the garage," and a Jewish mother who survived childhood "in the slums of four cities " The young woman endures high school by escaping to the attic, "my dusty heaven," where maps tacked on the walls remind her of the "abundant and mysterious world" beyond Detroit "Love's body spread-eagled on the walls, red roads, black roads I will come'" Pledging herself to the trade of Emily Dickinson ("who would understand about the attic"), Jill soon realizes that "Hamlet gets to hog the whole play, emoting in wonderful soliloquies but all Ophelia gets is the mad scene and a mouthful of waterweed " Jill reminisces about being "stuck on Callie," the girlfriend she "seduced" in seventh grade "I knew it was bad, but so were two thirds of our amusements It did not seem worse than shoplifting from Woolworth's " Later she finds "a label for my adventuring " "Am I sick...

...and insomnia " Next comes Peter, a wealthy, self-centered physics student who cheats on Jill with Donna, whom he eventually marnes and takes to beating There follows the best buddy of Donna's rapist, Kemp, a violent, racist hood-with-a-heart-of-gold who teaches Jill to cook Italian and rob dental warehouses Even Howie, Jill's high school confidant, is found wanting, he leaves Jill simply because she made a successful pass at the other woman he had been seeing (a theme Piercy examined in The High Cost of Living the beauty and pain of love blind to gender ) Not only college men are rotten Jill's brother Leo lives across the state border so he won't have to pay child support on any of his previous marriages Francis, the brother she's closer to, is a gambler and shyster who dies, she suggests, at the hands of the police Even doctors and dentists are despicable (Jill accompanies her mother for routine dental repairs, the dentist pulls out all her mother's teeth without administering novocaine and sends her home with a mouthful of wadded Kleenex) And the sexist manipulativeness of psychiatrists is surpassed by that of abortionists They collect their money and send their patients home to bleed to death They also figure heavily in Braided Lives, since the young women are usually worrying about being, recovering from being, or helping each other be or not be pregnant In Jill's rather myopic moral code, needing an abortion justifies robberies When such extreme methods aren't used, the money is usually collected from everyone except the male involved, who is not informed until after the fact, and never by the appropriate woman The best and worst solution, Jill decides, is to perform one's own abortion, which her mother helps her do We never learn how, though, since the mature Jill censors the scene out of a committment to women who might harm themselves in a similar effort...