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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pure Piercy, March 6, 2004
One doesn't pick up a Marge Piercy novel for some mindless entertainment. Piercy, a deeply committed and passionate author and poet, has something to say--and she has done so strongly and well in her many novels. So I knew going in that I was going to have an unforgettable experience, as many of Piercy's novels have never left my consciousness, most notably, "Vida" and "Braided Lives," among others. Nevertheless, I was not prepared for the brutal read that is "The Third Child." When I say "brutal," I am not referring to violence or mayhem, although one could certainly make a case for psychological violence in this plot ... Melissa Dickinson, who considers herself too tall, too fat, and altogether lumpish, thanks to her shrew of a mother, is the third of four chidren in the picture-perfect family of her father, Senator Dick Dickinson. We gather that the senator is an arch conservative, whose wife (and Melissa's uncaring mother), Rosemary, a small-boned, brittle beauty, is the power behind the throne. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop Rosemary in her constant and obsessive push to further her husband's career all the way to the presidency. Every aspect of Melissa's life is a photo op. Otherwise, she sees nothing of her father, and her mother only communicates to criticize. So it is no wonder, then, that when Melissa finally escapes to college, she falls heavily and hard for just the "wrong type of boy" in her mother's eyes, had her mother known about the romance. Blake is 19, like Melissa, a gorgeous black man who was adopted and raised by a prominent Jewish famiy and who considers himself Jewish as well. A double whammy for the oh-so-WASP Dickinsons. But Melissa is besotted with Blake, madly passionately in love as only a first love can be. Too bad the reader is not--there is something just a bit off with this boy, and the reader is at a loss to know what it is. Here is Piercy's genius coming through. The Dickinson matriarch is such a horrible, manipulative and terrible person, that the reader is loathe to take any opinion that would in any way coincide with hers. And yet as a mother of a 19-year-old daughter, all I could think as a reader was, "get away from this boy! He's no good!" And yet I didn't know why. This sense of unease grows throughout the book to an almost unbearable level as we see the insidious manipulation of Melissa from all sides, even when we can't figure out what it's about. The ending is explosive and troubling in the extreme. This is a scathing indictment of politics in America, no matter what the political party. It makes any reader stop and think, especially in an election year...I recommend it to everybody, no matter how liberal or conservative they may be. Another triumph for Piercy, who simply gets better and better with every book she writes.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Our path is together. Don't you know that yet?", November 25, 2003
It is difficult to characterize this novel. It's certainly a coming-of-age novel, tracing, as it does, Melissa Dickinson's life from age 17 - 19, and it's certainly a political novel in the sense that it focuses on her relationship with her father, a conservative senator from Pennsylvania and former two-term governor, a proponent of the death penalty who oversaw several executions. It's also a "suspense" novel in that it involves research into possible corruption, with a grand climax in the last ten pages. Thin on character, it is also more theatrical than subtle--easy to imagine as a film or TV program. The third child in a political family which does not have enough time for her, Melissa Dickinson is a bright student who goes off to a fine university in Connecticut. There she immediately meets a handsome young man who, for reasons she cannot fathom (but which the reader will immediately guess), sweeps her off her feet and engages her in an overwhelming, passionate affair. She soon discovers that he is the son of a lawyer who represented a convicted murderer executed during her father's term. He wants to "research" her father and collect data about him, and she, resenting the family dynamics, which do not recognize her as an individual, agrees to help her lover. Romantic and melodramatic, the novel depends on the reader's belief that the daughter of a two-term governor who is now a senator and friend of the President really could be as naive as Melissa is. Though she is seventeen, supposedly has scored 1460 on her SATs, and has attended fine schools, she apparently has no curiosity whatever about government or education in basic civics, referring, at one point, to the Secretary of the Interior--"whatever that meant." Her point of view is reflected in short, simple sentences, like that of a much younger teenager, until she begins her relationship with Blake Ackerman, when her sentences get longer, though she continues to think in cliches: "She felt as if he were the only person she had ever known who saw what she needed." As the data-gathering on her father continues, Melissa still remains completely naive, suspecting neither motives nor actions, even when they involve computers, hidden keys, floor plans, and vows of secrecy. Most readers, however, will guess the plot complications before they happen. Though some sympathy may be generated for Melissa, she and the other characters are stereotypical, rather than unique, and they behave according to form. The grand climax, when it happens, may be less grand for some readers than they had hoped. Mary Whipple
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Come on, Marge!, March 11, 2004
By A Customer
My 7-day check-out of Marge Piercy's new book, The Third Child, expired today. Although I was only 1/3 through the book, I took the unusual (for me) step of returning it, unfinished, rather than pay the fine, because there were some things about the story that I just couldn't get past. The heroine of the story is Melissa. Melissa is the daughter of a Republican senator; she attends Wellesley. She meets an adopted boy of unknown racial descent and begins a love affair with him. Melissa hates her parents who are cold and bad, presumably because they are Republican. On the other hand, she is obsessed with "Blake", who is distant, secretive, at times surly, and who nearly forces her to have sex with him the first time they are alone together, saying "I'm only taking what's mine." Hmmmmmmmm. Wow. But perhaps the hardest thing for me to get past were Blake's comments about his parents. Or rather, lack of them. Although he was adopted by his parents at birth, when asked about his parents for the first time, Blake says that he doesn't have any, because he was adopted. His adoptive parents raised him and are sending him to an expensive college; but he *doesn't have any parents because he was adopted*. Then who are the people who raised him? I have said elsewhere that I would read Marge Piercy's grocery list. I have to amend that statement. I could not bring myself to finish this book. I found the heroine ditzy; the "hero" was a *complete* jerk; and the "villains" (Melissa's Republican parents) painted with broad, stereotypical strokes (cold-hearted, racist, want-to-kill-your-grandma kind of people). Marge, I hope you were going somewhere with all of this; but I won't be finishing the book to find out.
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