474
THOMAS EDWARDS
achieve an authentic selfhood. Perhaps so; but the idea has its serious diffi–
culties, and Piercy's nominal withholding of judgment doesn't convince me
that the book has considered the e with enough skepticism. Here is Beth
thinking about her life in a New Hampshire commune:
The men there were the first men Beth had been real friends with. Every–
one in that house had been through a year and a half of fighting their old
anitudes and consciously trying to play equal and looser roles. Men who
had been involved in such a struggle were different in obvious and subtle
ways. They had different manners and different anxieties. In gross ways
the house was unlike other communes: the men cooked too and the
women also chopped wood and the men LOok care of the children and the
women climbed up on ladders and worked side by side repairing the roof.
One of the men , Alan, did needlepoint for pleasure. He was also accurate
with a rifle.
The LOne of rather naive surprise is undoubtedly Beth's alone, but I can only
suppose that at some level Piercy shares her pleasure in the image of a life in
which people are emerging from culturally-imposed sexual roles. I can share
that pleasure myself, but only while remembering that images aren't literal
cases and wishing that this particular one weren't so tidy, that Alan
wasn't
also accurate with a rifle, that more weight could be given to "consciously
trying to play." Marge Piercy is an admirably intelligent and serious writer,
but the explora tion and analysis of "role" may lead LO the erosion of "charac–
ter,"
to
the fictional obscuring of just that personal freedom her characters so
badly want
to
achieve.
Small Changes
tends to reduce its characters to the
social and political terms they are meant to enact; and 'while this, it could be
argued, is a necessary stage in the revolution of consciousness the book hopes
to
contribute
to,
it seems in the short run at least an ambiguous artistic and
human achievement.
Where Lerman and Piercy are in some sense (though not a derogaLOry
one) provincial novelists, both geographically and culturally, Eleanor Berg–
stein is visibly a cosmopolitan one. She assumes a common fund of experience
and outlook in her readers, a sense of contemporary life founded on a "moral "
comm itment
to
politics and a ophisticated relation
to
informational media, a
readiness for certain kinds of jokes, for example, that I fear I myself am only
too ready for:
When she started to feel bener she bought a lavender tweed coat with frog
closings, and was taken around the city [Hong Kong] by the guide who
had taken around Liz Taylor and Mike Todd. "She beautiful, " he said,
"and he say LO me 'Tommy you smaht boy I want you Carifoonia ' and she
say 'what is this clap?' and he say 'shut up you dum blawd' and she c1y."
I'm not particularly anxious LO examine my amusement at this, which
must draw upon racial condescensions and the mixture of desire and malice
any media-voyeur feels ; but Bergstein knows that readers like me are out
there ready
to
take such bait, and she plays us with considerable skill.
