The High Cost of Living. Marge Piercy (New York, Harper and Row, 1978, 268pp., $10.00)

I find Marge Piercy's new book, The High Cost of Living, not quite as good as her other works, which probably means it's better. I felt the same way about Woman on the Edge of Time until I lived with it a little. Books that are truly alive and individual don't fit easily into preconceptions about what “the novel” should be doing. In addition, Piercy tackles subjects in such an uncompromising, straightforward way that her novels carry an odd air of obviousness about them; surely (one says, reading) something this clear can't be good. Why, everybody knows what this book tells me. But, ah, look around you! They don't.

“All the things you don't know about me would make a new world,” wrote Ida Mae Tassin from Bedford Hills Penitentiary. Not that I know these things, either, mind you; I'm quoting Elizabeth Janeway quoting Kathryn Watterson Burckhardt quoting Ida Mae Tassin – thus (third-hand) do the statements of the poor and powerless enter even that marginal part of academia devoted to feminist scholarship. The High Cost of Living is a truth of this sort: the price exacted from those who are both poor and homosexual. This subject is grim, gritty, and gray, and Piercy makes it neither elegant, stylistically ingenious, nor luridly false. Thus the most astonishing thing about Living is not that it was written (if you know Piercy's other work, that won't surprise you) but that Piercy, in some workingclass survival dodge unknown to middle-class academics like myself, got it published.

The jacket blurb is a study in confusion, from the assertion that the heroine's boss is a “spoiled parasitic academic” (in his milder forms he is a very common type in the circles I travel in) to the zany notion that the heroine's isolation is caused by “relentless ideology” (she is poor and lesbian…