Book Review: Woman on the Edge of Time

A Fair Trade Book

(Note that I currently have four copies of this book, different editions, and what Amazon is currently showing as a New Book is different from all of them.)

Title: Woman on the Edge of Time

Author: Marge Piercy

Date: 1976

Publisher: Knopf

ISBN: none

Length: 384 pages

Quote: "Sweet earth, I lie in your lap. / I borrow your strength. I win you every day."

Of all the books on my college reading list I think it's fair to say that this is the one that's given me most pleasure over the years. I think it's likely that never before or since has the Old Left's utopian dream been so beautifully portrayed.

Do I disagree with many of its stated and underlying beliefs? Of course.

Did the teacher who assigned it expect students to disagree with it? Of course.

Has even Piercy, according to her more recent books, come to disagree with some of it? Of course. Because this novel is a utopian fantasy as idealistic as The Silmarillion. It is not, never was, never could have been, and never will be real--but between the covers of this book is enclosed a real memory of good people who sincerely believed in their utopian dream.

That said, I must now, in order to maintain membership in the Aunts' Union, mention that it's not really a nice book. In the best tradition of the twentieth century's distrust of imagination, the socialist utopia is presented as a series of visions--either an experiment in mental telepathy that's much more successful than any of the real ones, or a psychotic fugue, whichever you prefer--in contrast to the horrible Socialist Realist life of the protagonist, Connie Ramos. Both Connie's real life and her visionary life are full of violence, other sexual perversions, deceit, abuse, and wrongful death. I've never found the novel pornographic, erotic, or tempting in any way, but it certainly contains more "onstage" sex and violence than this web site's contract would allow.

Well...the story starts with Connie's closest friend and niece, Dolly, a prostitute, bursting into Connie's home to get away from the father of her prospective baby, who is trying to force her to have an abortion. During the first chapter the scumbag and the abortionist come in after Dolly, there's a fight in which Connie breaks the scumbag's nose, and Connie ends up in the hospital with the scumbag manipulating the other two into agreeing that Connie is the one who beat up the three younger people. How is this possible? Well...Connie has a record. While mourning her last bedmate's death, she got drunk, broke her little girl's arm, and pled insanity. As a forty-year-old pauper who's actually quite levelheaded, Connie ought logically to get out of the hospital in a week or two, but unfortunately some people happen to be looking for patients with what's not yet been formally labelled an "Intermittent Explosive Disorder"...if they really try, and they do, they can convince themselves that Connie is a salvageable patient who really happens to suffer from "violent episodes."

Before admission to the hospital, Connie had noticed--or had she hallucinated?--that she seemed to be being stalked by a young man, but it was hard to tell to what extent he was "real." During the most boring moments in the hospital, she learns that although this person is healthier and more confident than Connie expects women her age to be, the young man is in fact a woman her age, a telepathic visitor from the future. Although any lapse of attention breaks their contact, they are able to visit each other's time and place at will, and for most of a year they do.

Connie's visitor is Luciente from Mattapoisett, a post-socialist utopian anarchist village that self-identifies with the Wamponaugs. All the people Connie notices in Mattapoisett remind her of people in her "real" life, as in one of those movies where people in the "real" and "dreamed" worlds are played by the same actors; Luciente just might be Connie's alter ego, but then again Luciente's future surprises and doesn't always please Connie. Luciente is participating in a psychic experiment, she says, in which people with telepathic talent try to make psychic contact with people in the past and inspire them to make the choices that will allow Luciente and her community to exist. Luciente is bound not to tell Connie what to do, in so many words, but if Connie makes the wrong choice, "We could--wink out."

While the danger facing Connie in the hospital slowly unfolds, we learn all about Connie's individual past as well as Luciente's future present. Connie has had many unsatisfactory sexual relationships, beginning with her rather nasty older brother, followed by an abusive teacher, a handsome first husband who was murdered, an abusive husband who's disappeared, and the partner-in-crime whom she's still mourning. Luciente has had many sexual relationships that were more satisfactory, most of which are still going on in a Sexual Revolution sort of way; "the most intense" was a lesbian relationship she's mostly outgrown, and currently she's most involved with a bisexual youth who resembles a homosexual patient in the hospital, and a mature man who resembles Connie's last man--so strongly that in one scene, at a party where everyone in Mattapoisett is "silly with wine and marijuana," Luciente goes off with her old girlfriend and leaves Connie to share what will probably be her last sexual experience with Luciente's bedmate. Some details of all this sexual activity are left to readers' imaginations; not enough. We're told more than we may have needed to know about other characters' sex lives, too, and although we meet two asexual characters as well as all the hetero- and homo- and bi-sexuals, the one sexual persona we do not meet in this novel is a happily married monogamous person. Feh.

But although Piercy dishes all the sexual "dirt on" her characters, she does a good job of keeping it in realistic proportion. Nobody, not even the teenagers (?!?!), seems to be "in love." People in Mattapoisett, and some people in Connie's real world, use sex to express friendship and good will. Other people in Connie's real world use sex as a selfish, abusive means of exploitation. People have lives. Money, social status, love of family, friendship, creative self-expression, and public spirit matter to these characters too. I suppose that's why the amount of explicit sex in this book never put me off. I am not, although this web site officially is, disgusted by any mention of any body part; I'm merely bored witless by endless details about bodies that don't seem to be occupied by human minds. The characters in Woman on the Edge of Time have human minds.

Increasingly, the focus of those human minds is on the social implications of Jose Delgado's neurological studies. (Those were real; Woman on the Edge of Time has a fair claim on the title "science fiction.") I happened first to read this book during the same term when my psychology textbook discussed Delgado's studies and the ethical dangers of paying too much to the possible implications of trying to control "the human spirit" by direct manipulation of the human brain. It was lucky for Delgado that he had a Spanish name and cultural permission, in the early 1970s, to experiment with direct electrical manipulation of aggressive behavior in bulls.

Well...Connie and some of her friends, especially the splendid ace character Sybil (a dead ringer for Luciente's girlfriend), sultry Southern Alice (who resembles the official "healer" in Mattapoisett), and lovable homosexual Skip (who resembles Luciente's younger man), all sane and decent people whose violence has been purely defensive, are about to be used in fictional experiments inspired by Delgado's. Each of them feels a need to escape or at least ruin the experiments. Each tries a different way, or ways. What Connie will do, in the hope of saving Mattapoisett and (she hopes) Sybil, is what makes her the "woman on the edge of time," and any more about that would ruin the suspense of the story, so I'd better stop right there. Whether it would have worked, in real life...I said I'd stop.

In one early review of Woman on the Edge of Time, some forgettable curmudgeon groused that Piercy spent too much time walking us through pleasant scene after pleasant scene in Mattapoisett. Margaret Atwood retorted that that was appropriate, because Woman on the Edge of Time was not a conventional adventure, romance, or fictional biography-type novel but "a utopia." And so it delightfully is--the most vividly realized, and for me the most plausible, utopia I've ever read.

Before reading this book I wouldn't have imagined it possible for a novel to begin and end with obscenely ugly violence and, in between those two ugly scenes and many others, communicate an experience of joy; yet that's what Woman on the Edge of Time does. It can be enjoyed as escape reading: take a Mattapoisett scene before bed if you want pleasant dreams.

Is escape fiction all it is? I think not.

Granted, we've all had many opportunities to see that no socialist government ever has led or will lead to Marx's implausible fantasy of a totalitarian government magically withering away, leaving people in the communist paradise-on-earth. Granted, even when viably small-scale experiments in voluntary communism work, they don't lead to paradise; the ones that don't fall apart when nobody feels inspired to do the housework tend to fall apart when children are born, founders grow old, or "community elders" die, or any combination of those. And granted, Mattapoisett is unmistakably an example of voluntary communism; a small village, because communism has rarely worked even for a small village, because the odds are against its working even for one family of grown-up brothers and sisters, but it's so beautiful when it does work...

Considering the technology of Mattapoisett, I don't see it as viable, much less sustainable. Our "smart phones" are already dang close to Luciente's and friends' "kenners," and what fun they are, and what awe they would have inspired in the 1970s, but they're not sustainable in any hypothetical economy remotely like Mattapoisett's; they're being underwritten by people who hope and intend to use them as tools of totalitarian government, and although they're not cheap for us to use, they may yet prove to be too expensive even for plutocrats to sustain. I can picture a community where bicycle pools work, where you could just grab a bike from public storage point A and ride it to storage point B and then continue on public transportation, but even if it were possible to eliminate all brain damage (nice trick!) and also all the social oppression that produces antisocial emotional reactions (even nicer!), I can't picture that system working in the freewheeling way it seems to work in Mattapoisett--not for many people, not for long. The eugenically engineered babies gestated in incubators seem a pure fantasy, neither viable nor, if they were viable, really desirable, even if the payoff could be that nobody would ever be born with any kind of physical or mental disability, not even extroversion.

But I do see, as in Piercy's memoir Sleeping with Cats, a sort of splendid shining archetype of an experience we might call The Very Best Summer You Ever Had. For at least one summer, between the ages of ten and thirty, your health was perfect; you were bursting with crazy adolescent energy; you wanted to push yourself to the limits of your physical and mental powers. And you had friends and co-workers; at least some of them became your synergistic partners; all your favorite people seemed to be doing your favorite things along with you. And oh the days, oh the days, oh the fine long summer days, and the nights when you dragged yourself to bed savoring the bliss of finally being tired out, and the mornings when you bounced out of bed eager to get tired out all over again, because you were learning and doing and sharing so much! If you've had that experience, for all your life you'll remember it as Paradise On Earth. (And there might have been a romance somewhere in the mix, too--but that was gravy.) Everybody was having "peak experiences." Everybody was "achieving flow." Each person's emotional "high" was feeding into each other person's "high."

It has nothing to do with communism except that, incidentally, Piercy's friends happened to be Marxists who found joy in working toward their socialist revolution. It's about community...a community of task-focussed, conscientious, gifted-and-talented introverts. Similar community experiences have been documented among religious groups, humanitarian mission groups, scientific research groups, organizers of schools and hospitals, even capitalists building businesses together, as well as hippie communes and Israeli kibbutzim. They are almost obligatory for musical bands. I had two different Mattapoisett-like summers, with different people, in different places. In other books--The Valley of Song seems to have tried hardest--other writers have described similar experiences; I think Piercy has brought the joy of synergistic work to life more vividly and credibly than any other author in English, living or dead.

And so, knowing how the story ends, I've found myself rereading Woman on the Edge of Time every five years or so, marvelling each time at how skillfully Piercy spins the illusion, and basking in the joys of working out my vocation now and remembering times when my work flowed together with other's work. This is not just an ordinary feel-good book. It's a feel-profoundly-good book.

If you buy it here, unless you specify one particular edition, you'll get whichever (of about a dozen editions) is currently the best bargain: $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment. Depending on whether you get the oversized hardcover or a mass-market paperback, one to seven more books of this size could fit into one $5 package. Amazon's prices and selections change daily; e-mail salolianigodagewi to discuss your options.