Marge Piercy will leave a … lasting mark with … Woman on the Edge of Time, although it is not a perfect book. There is nothing like a suburban condition for Piercy; she tackles concepts as large as femininity and temporality, and her work functions in extremes, polarities which conflict and crash to the sound of unmitigated suffering. Those collisions are captured in highly personal and sympathetic human portraits…. (p. 38)
Although jarring at times, the oppositions Piercy sets up between present and future, rich and poor, urban squalor and scientific pastoralism, imprisonment and freedom, never produce caricatures. In fact, her utopia is more believable and moving than many renderings of contemporary reality. Like a latter-day D. H. Lawrence, she sees the future as a revival of tradition, eternal values and human ritual…. The organic is stronger than the synthetic, the real invalidates what is fake, and community thus becomes a state of mind.
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