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| WOMAN
ON THE EDGE OF TIME
With a power and truth that rock us — and through the medium
of a woman who becomes vitally alive, important, and dear to us
— Marge Piercy moves between a revelation of our present
society and a startling twin projection of the possible future.
The woman "on the edge of time" is Consuelo (Connie)
Ramos. A Chicana in New York City, she is in her mid-thirties,
once beautiful, now worn and disheveled, once a college girl,
now a pickpocket, both loving mother and "child abuser"
(her child taken from her), a mourning widow (unmarried), a heroically
sane woman labeled insane.
With her we experience the New York where Latinos live today
without money or hope of it; where food, cleanliness, order, and
peacefulness are Sunday luxuries; where life-force translates
as violence. And with her we experience the mental hospital where,
held against her will, she is faceless, invisible to the attendants,
social workers, doctors. . . where whatever she says and does
is received and recorded as "aggression," as "bad
patient behavior," until suddenly she is valued at last as
a potential subject for a frightening neuro-electric experiment
on which hundreds of monkeys have already been "used up." |
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And with her — as Connie's determination grows to fight her way
out of her powerlessness — we enter the two worlds of the possible
future to which she is summoned. In one - the playful androgynous society
of Mattapoisett, a hundred years from now, when the human person is paramount-we
experience an enchanting, though imperiled, world of ceremony and civility
that nurtures the infant, early frees the child from the possessiveness
of its (three!) parents, puts technology to the uses of life, and encompasses
death itself as part of the great adventure of living. And at its gate,
the threatening armies of the other - the bleak and grotesque - future,
in which the dividing line between person and thing has finally been eroded.
WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME is at once a heightening of the novel of
realism and a brilliant prophetic fable. It is Marge Piercy's triumph
to take us so wholly into the very being of a stranger that we come
to perceive her fate as inseparable from our own.
“Both absorbing and exciting,”
—The New York Times Book Review
“An ambitious, unusual novel about the possibilities for moral
courage in contemporary society.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
"A fiercely brilliant writer. . . a novel which on several levels
is as chilling, provocative and at least as controversial as SMALL CHANGES."
-- Jane Howard
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