Review: Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Tue Dec 31 20:20:50 PST 2019


Woman on the Edge of Time
by Marge Piercy

Publisher: Ballantine
Copyright: 1976
Printing:  2016
ISBN:      0-307-75639-4
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     419

Woman on the Edge of Time opens with Connie (Consuela) Ramos's niece
Dolly arriving at the door of her tiny apartment with a bloody face.
Her pimp, the cause of the bloody face, shows up mere moments later
with a doctor to terminate Dolly's pregnancy. After a lot of shouting
and insults, Connie breaks a glass bottle across Geraldo's face,
resulting in her second involuntary commitment to a mental institution.

The first time was shortly after the love of her life was arrested for
shoplifting and, in an overwhelmed moment, she hit her young daughter.
That time, she felt she deserved everything that happened to her, not
that it made much difference. Her daughter disappeared into the foster
care system and she ended up on welfare, unable to get a job. She did
get out of the institution, though. That's more of a question this
time.

The other difference in Connie's life is that Luciente has made contact
with her. Luciente is apparently from the future, appears in Connie's
apartment, speaks an odd dialect, and is both horrified and fascinated
by the New York City of Connie's time. She is also able to bring Connie
mentally into the future, to a community called Mouth-of-Mattapoisett,
which has no insane asylums, welfare, capitalism, pimps, condescending
social workers, pollution, or the other plagues of Connie's life.

Woman on the Edge of Time sets a utopia against a dystopia, but the
dystopia is 1970s America seen through the life of a poor
Mexican-American woman. The Mattapoisett sections follow the classical
utopia construction with Connie as the outside visitor to whom the
utopia is explained. The present-day sections are a parade of horrors
as Connie attempts to survive institutionalization, preserve a shred of
dignity, and navigate the system well enough to be able to escape it.
At first, these two environments are simply juxtaposed, but about
two-thirds of the way through the book it becomes clear that Luciente's
future is closely linked, and closely influenced by, Connie's present.

I wanted to like this book, but I struggled with it. It took me about
two months to read it, and I kept putting it down and reading something
else instead. I'm finding it hard to put my finger on why it didn't
work for me, but I think most of the explanation is Connie.

Piercy commits fully in this story to making Connie an ordinary person.
Her one special characteristic is her ability to receive Luciente's
psychic contact from the future, and to reach out in return. Otherwise,
she's an average person who has lived a very hard life, who is
struggling with depression and despair, and whose primary reaction to
the events of the book is a formless outrage mixed with self-pity. This
is critical to the conclusion of the story, and it's a powerful
political statement: Ordinary people can affect the world, their
decisions matter, and you don't have to be anyone special to fight
oppression.

Unfortunately, this often makes the Mattapoisett sections, which are
the best part of this book, frustrating to read. Not only does Connie
not ask the questions about the future utopia that I wanted to ask, but
she also reacts to most of the social divergences with disgust,
outrage, or lasting confusion. This too I think is an intentional
authorial choice — a true course correction in our world isn't also
going to be comfortable and familiar, all of us will disagree with some
of those choices, and Connie is not someone who grew up reading utopian
literature — but it adds a lot of negative emotion to what is otherwise
a positive celebration of how much better humanity can be. The people
of Mattapoisett are endlessly patient with Connie in ways that also
highlight strengths of their society, but I frequently found myself
wanting to read a different story about Luciente, Jackrabbit, and the
others without Connie there to recoil from the most drastic changes or
constantly assume the worst of their customs.

I felt like I understood Connie and empathized with her, but I didn't
like her. It's hard to read books where you don't like the main
character.

The present-day scenes are an endless sequence of nightmares. Connie
has a couple of friends inside the institution, who are also just
trying to survive, but is otherwise entirely alone. Her niece tries
occasionally, but is so strung out on drugs that she can't hold a
coherent train of thought. Every figure of authority in the book treats
Connie with contempt. All medical staff treat the patients like
animals; the best that any of them can hope for is to be treated like a
tolerable but ugly pet. I fully believe this was accurate for at least
some facilities in some places, but it's soul-crushing to read about at
length. I found myself slogging through those sections of the book,
waiting for another interlude in Mattapoisett where at least I could
enjoy the utopian world-building and relax a bit around happy
characters.

This is, to be clear, effective at conveying the political point that
Piercy is making. It's striking to read about Connie's horrific life
and realize that it would be far worse today. Outside of the
institution, she was living on long-term welfare, something that no
longer exists in the United States. There are essentially no more
mental institutions of the type in which she was held today; we closed
them all in the 1980s and dumped all the residents on the streets. As
Piercy points out in her forward, this is not an improvement. Today,
Connie would either be homeless or in prison, her circumstances would
be even worse than they were in the book, and even this plot would not
be possible.

It's hard to know what to say about books that say true things with the
level of anger and revulsion that our world warrants and do not give
the reader the comfortable wrapping of characters with room to be
happy. There is little Piercy says here that's wrong, and it's
something we should hear, but apart from the Mattapoisett interludes I
found it miserable to read. I read partly for escapism and for a break
from dwelling on the unfolding horrors of the news cycle, so I struggle
with books that feel like an extension of the day-to-day reporting on
how awfully we treat our fellow humans. This is a problem I have with
much of 1970s feminist SF: The books are incandescently angry, and
rightfully so, about problems that are largely unfixed fifty years
later, and I come away deeply depressed by humans as a species.

The heart of this book is the carefully-constructed Mattapoisett
utopia, which says fascinating things about parenting, ecological
balance, interpersonal relationships, communal living, personal
property and its appropriate place in society, and governance
structures. Piercy does cheat with some psychic empathy and some
semi-magical biology, but most of what she describes would be possible
with our current technology. I've not talked much about that in this
review because the other parts of the book hit me so strongly, but this
is a very interesting utopia. If you like analyzing and thinking about
alternative ways of living, this is thought-provoking stuff.

I can see why other people liked this book better than I did, and I
have great respect for its political goal and for Piercy's utopian
world-building. It wasn't the book for me, but it might be for you.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-12-31

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-307-75639-4.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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