Marge Piercy is full of exhortation. Her first novel ["Going Down Fast"]—about urban "renewal," the radical community, the tab-top non-calorific managerial class in Chicago—seizes you by the lapels (or the dashiki) and flings you into a bomb site. Her "fate" is man-made, a compound of power and venality; her method, a relentless exactitude, a Doris Lessing like accumulation of raw detail.

"Going Down Fast" refers both to buildings under the wrecker's ball and to the people living in those buildings, the permanently evicted. From multiple points of view Miss Piercy tells the interconnected stories of two young female teachers (Jewish, black), a blues singer, a welfare caseworker, an underground filmmaker. Their deceptions and accommodations Marge Piercy 1936– © Thomas Victor 1983weave in and out of a political essay vividly describing how real estate promoters, social scientists and a university make war not for, but on, the poor.

Miss...