I'd like to propose a program of civil rights for characters in novels. I don't think it is fair for authors to push them around or malign them just to make a point or put across a message….

Marge Piercy's … novel, "The High Cost of Living," leads me to these reflections. In it she creates just one interesting character—and then destroys him. Not because the logic of his life or his circumstances demands it, because it is dramatically inevitable, but for reasons that I can only conjecture, and that, from all appearances, would seem to be polemical.

In "The High Cost of Living" Leslie, a young lesbian, and Bernie, a young male homosexual, struggle for the affections of Honor, a pretentious 17-year-old virgin. Although neither Leslie nor Bernie will admit it, Honor is so stultifyingly silly that they are more or less forced into an appreciation of...