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careful to liven things up with festivals, ceremonies, nice clothes, and a hopeful description of untrammelled sexual interchange. There are problems, of course, but we are allowed to see the inhabitants working them out through council meetings and “wormings,” a wonderful name for a session at which you accuse and complain. Some of these projections are a bit much: it’s especially hard to write about communication between cats and humans in any way that isn’t whimsical; and utopian children have difficulty being anything but cute or bratty. But the language Piercy has devised for her utopians has unexpected felicities as well as its leaden moments; some of the utopian passages even manage to be oddly moving. The poignancy comes in part from Connie’s hunger for human contact and love, in part from the resemblances she sees between the utopians and her lost child, lover, and friends. The outer virtues of Mattapoisett are overshadowed by an inner one: it is the only place where Connie is loved.

However, several issues are dodged. The utopians refuse to fill Connie in on history, so we never find out much about how it all happened. They’re engaged in a war with an enemy, but we don’t learn much about this either. And they tell Connie they are not “the” future, but only a possible future, and that they need her help in the present to avoid “winking out.” (I wish this didn’t sound so much like the resuscitation of Tinker Bell in Peter Pan.) At one point Connie stumbles into another future—presumably what will happen if we don’t all put our shoulders to the wheel—in which women are termitelike objects and the air is so polluted you can’t see the sky.

The Mattapoisett call to action only bewilders poor Connie, whose scope is of necessity limited. She ends by bumping off a few of the evil asylum shrinks, and because of the ambiguity of the last sections we’re left with the uneasy feeling that Mattapoisett may have been a paranoid fantasy after all. The only evidence against this interpretation is that Connie isn’t educated enough to have such a utopian vision.

Woman on the Edge of Time is like a long inner dialogue in which Piercy answers her own questions about how a revised American society would work. The curious thing about serious utopias, as opposed to the satirical or entertainment variety, is that their authors never seem to write more than one of them; perhaps because they are products, finally, of the moral rather than the literary sense.

H. Rider Haggard’s

She

When I first read H. Rider Haggard’s highly famous novel She, I didn’t know it was highly famous. I was a teenager, it was the 1950s, and She was just one of the many books in the cellar. My father unwittingly shared with Jorge Luis Borges a liking for nineteenth-century yarns with touches of the uncanny coupled with rip-roaring plots; and so, in the cellar, where I was supposed to be doing my homework, I read my way through Rudyard Kipling and Conan Doyle, and Dracula and Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson and H. G. Wells, and also Henry Rider Haggard. I read King Solomon’s Mines first, with its adventures and tunnels and lost treasure, and then Allan Quatermain, with its adventures and tunnels and lost civilization. And then I read She.

I had no socio-cultural context for these books then—the British Empire was the pink part of the map, “imperialism and colonialism” had not yet acquired their special negative charge, and the accusation “sexist” was far in the future. Nor did I make any distinctions between great literature and any other kind. I just liked reading. Any book that began with some mysterious inscriptions on a very old broken pot was fine with me, and that is how She begins. There was even a picture at the front of my edition—not a drawing of the pot but a photograph of it, to make the yarn really convincing. (The pot was made to order by Haggard’s sister-in-law; he intended it to function like the pirate map at the beginning of Treasure Island—a book the popularity of which he hoped to rival—and it did.)

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