The Cost of Lunch, Etc.

May 19, 2014
With uncompromising emotional intensity, Piercy (Gone to Soldiers), the author of 17 novels, 17 volumes of poetry, and a memoir, captures the complex female experience in her debut short story collection. From the title story featuring an aspiring female poet who weighs the price of sex and poetry to a student’s disenchantment with her high school teacher (“Somebody Who Understands You”), Piercy maps the interior lives of women across generations, paying special attention to the socio-politcal environment that affects them. Her writing maintains a skillful detachment, limning moments of isolation between characters with palpable unease: “He is gentle. If he does not touch her with passion, neither does he hurt her. That is very important, not to be hurt.” Piercy, whose work is inseparable from her feminist politics, includes many characters (seven of whom are writers) who are suggestively autobiographical in their histories and musings, including a girl dying of rheumetic fever (“She’s Dying, He Said”), an anti–Vietnam War activist shuttling men to the Canadian border (“The Border”). Piercy is best at unraveling what she creates—turning an answer into a question in “Do You Love Me?,” and a soliloquy punctuated by silence in “Little Sister, Cat and Mouse.” Powerful in scope, the collection feels driven by an idea rather than a story, demonstrating Pierce’s understanding of how social constructs evolve in deeply personal ways.

July 1, 2014
Piercy's (Sex Wars, 2005) latest short stories focus, as do her many novels, poetry collections, and earlier stories, on powerful female characterswomen who are not always right, or sympathetic, or admirable, but definitely strong. The mother in Saving Mother from Herself is a hoarder coerced by her daughter into relinquishing her precious collection to the dump or local resale shopsand then changes the locks on her house, avoids her phone, and hits the yard-sale circuit with renewed vigor. A teenager in Going over Jordan stands up to her parents, gradually breaking away from the stifling confinement of their fundamentalist church. In She's Dying, He Said, a woman looks back on the year in her childhood when she had German measles followed by rheumatic fever, and the doctor and her family gave her up for deadexcept for her vigilant Jewish grandmother, who warded off the demons and nursed her back to health. Piercy homes in on her characters, mixing just the right amount of humor into her always insightful take on imperfect human relationships, in their many guises.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)