The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 24 October 2010
by Marge Piercy
Being out of control of our lives is one of the greatest fears of any American, perhaps of any human. We are counseled by our religions to surrender to the fates, "go with the flow" and join in the chaotic stream in which we all swim. That fear of having your life out of your control is the basis of all our efforts to make our homes and communities safe. It is the fear that the government, too, has too much power. If we can't choose not to pay for health care, if the government requires us to pay, where is our control over our own lives? (By the way, single-payer would free us all.) What happens to us if we find ourselves at the mercy of those government-sanctioned people of power who tell us that they know better than we do how to take care of our lives? What happens to our self control, our self esteem and our sense of being if we fall into the Kafka-esque realm in which all our protests are taken as evidence against our very ability to reason?
In this novel, we meet Consuela, a 35-year-old Hispanic woman living in New York City. All her life, she has lived on the edge of society. She is poor and has had a string of husbands who have scraped by on petty crime and regular stints in prison. Her daughter was taken away from her after one violent bout with drugs and alcohol and she struggles to keep her life together in the midst of chaos from the city and her family. Since she has once spent some time in a mental institution, she carries a stigma with her, and her life is easily wrested from whatever control she has over it. Thus the book opens with Connie taken away again, at the whims of her indifferent brother and distracted niece. At the hospital, nobody listens to the injustice of her story. She is merely crazy, and cannot think for herself. Piercy's evocation of institutional indifference is nightmarish, frustrating and haunting. She vividly portrays Connie's struggle to be heard, to be merely recognized as human.
Of course, at any time, if any of us is recieving messages from another time or another planet, we can expect to doubt the stability of our faculties. Connie has, meanwhile, been receiving regular visits from a person from a century and a half in the future. Luciente is a "sender", casting her thoughts across time. Connie is a "catcher", and they make a vital connection that allows Connie to visit an idyllic and slightly flawed Utopian future. It is a world in which communal life, a fantasy of Sixties ideals, has been fully realized. Gender roles have been dissolved. Work is a communal effort at nurturing the environment. Life is taken as a great connection to the universe. In other words, it is a world utterly unlike our own, and Piercy contrasts Connie's institutionalization with this great Utopian dream. Much of the story's basis can be found in the statement "I want a better world." So why can't we have that world? Because humans are greedy, indifferent and competitive. Piercy's frustration at Connie's predicament is palpable. In the end, it hardly matters if Connie's visions of the future are real visits to that time or merely the hallucinations of her mental instability. What matters is that we can see how different, how much better life can be if we put our minds to it. The book is a sweeping tour-de-force. It drags a bit in Luciente's descriptions of the future, but that counters the bleakness of Connie's imprisonment. Piercy has surely done her research. Her depiction of the mental institution and its patients is stark and vivid. This is not quite a science fiction time travel story. It is more a picture of life on the edges of society (in 1976), and a plaintive wish that we get our collective act together.