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and preoccupation with "contemporary reality" as touted by the blurb.
Nevertheless, her prose has a bleeding heart.
The blurb also claims that the troubles of Leslie, lesbian, practi–
tioner of karate, graduate history researcher, bear on "the issues that
most intensely concern the people who live at the growing edge of our
society." Unfortunately,
The High Cost of Living
reads more like a
minority report from the margins, unaware of its own share in the
pathos it evokes. Like Ms. Calisher's, Ms. Piercy's identification with
her heroine makes overtures towards objectivity. She unclamps Leslie
from the rape hot line
to
test her in the straight world and the academic
rat-race. Leslie can
be
a stern critic of lesbian and feminist introversion.
She condemns ex-lover Val's refusal of "real-world skills" and retreat
into "a woman's theatre course" and "classes in palmistry and doily–
making." Although Leslie's own pursuit of a further degree has tied
her to the career of George, a high-grade academic rat (thus bringing
about her separation from Val), a desire for intellectual integrity as
well as economic independence drives her on. She rejects-or rational–
izes her rejection by?-lesbian coupledom and community-living as
personified by Tasha who runs the hot line and "the women's school":
She wanted
to
live in Tasha's world only in her spare time. She got
on her lovable small secondhand Honda, that ate up her extra
pennies and made her feel good and headed for George.
The novel's somewhat outre morality makes it difficult to deter–
mine whether this represents compromise or triumphant accommoda–
tion on Leslie's part. Anyway, riding easily and gallantly into the
uncertain future , with her black belt under her belt, she leaves behind
as cloying a taste as any Ouida heroine-or hero. Earlier
rha~odies
during a fleeting reunion with Val plumb the mawkish depths of the
well of loneliness:
Killen Val. Stray killen, sleek and pampered now. Val who had cried
and cried. Who stared into the mirror with hungry eyes and turned
away pouting, sulking.. . . This child on speed at seventeen, straight
again by nineteen. This baby born again crying at Leslie's breasts.
Leslie's other key relationships, with teenage ingenue Honor and
gay Bernard, are a little more coolly but too programmatically con–
ceived, as if computer-selected to broaden her horizons ("suppose I told
them my best friends in Detroit are a straight woman and a man"). The
working-class or deprived origins of all three receive an unconvincing
stress-Leslie is "car-poor," Bernard obliged to steal or to live parasiti-
