Customer Reviews

The Third Child : A Novel

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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.

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

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.

I have been a Marge Piercy fan for years. Even if she can get a little maudlin and melodramatic at times, her heroines like VIDA and Shira in HE, SHE and IT are among the bravest and most original in contemporary literature. I took THE THIRD CHILD on a trip, eagerly looking forward to a good read from my favorite Jewish woman author. Was I disappointed. More angry than disappointed, really. A soap opera of cliches .I am used to the fact that the men in her books are users of women, conniving and untrustworthy. Sex with women is always better than sex with men. Piercy is married, but is also a lesbian, bisexual? But here the sex is great, the man is... a murderer. This struck me as racist to the extreme. Why would Blake, the son of a convicted murderer (we never know whether he was really guilty) a good-looking and talented college student, be cast as a murderer himself? What is Ms. Piercy saying? That you can't escape your race, your heritage, your genes?And the "political" family (the father a senator who supported the execution of Blake's father) please! Maybe if it were a comedy or satire, but she's playing it straight. I don't much like Republicans either, but I know Piercy is capable of deeper, richer characters whose words and actions ring true.

Melissa Dickinson was in her senior year at Miss Porter's School in Connecticut. "In her father's family ... the women always attended Miss Porter's --- even her, no matter how far down the family hierarchy she was rated. Her father wanted to be President, and her mother was determined to get him there. Daddy's importance was like a family member, bigger and even more visible than her two older siblings, Richard IV" ... an ambitious younger version of his politician father ... and her sister, smart, beautiful, lawyer-to-be Merilee. Her younger sibling Billy was the rebel but he had an edge that made him "acceptable" because he was handsome and smart. As the third child among the four, Lissa felt like a misfit. She had failed before she started in this family. And as the "outsider" she had taken an objective view of her family and she didn't particularly like what she was saw. In her position "she was powerless, but she could try to place them in perspective, she could learn and criticize, silently, stealthily. With [her parents] all was stealth."

Marge Piercy, who has written fifteen novels, sixteen books of poetry, a writing manual, a play, a memoir, a collection of essays and has edited an anthology of poetry written by American women opens her latest novel, THE THIRD CHILD, by introducing the reader to the Dickinson clan through the eyes of the story's mixed-up, unhappy, and very lonely heroine. Now that she was eighteen ... "she had gradually come to understand things that had been encoded and hidden when she had been young and naïve. Her past with her parents rewrote itself as she gathered knowledge, as the landscape of her childhood mutated out of ... blue skies to a landscape with shadows and dark pits and hidden fires burning," under the imperfect reality of her powerful parents. This form of narrative works perfectly; especially when she gives us hints of what we can expect to emerge as the novel unfolds.

"The first big event Melissa remembered after her father had become governor (of Pennsylvania) was an execution. The prisoner's name was Toussaint Parker, and he had killed a policeman." On the night he was to be put to death, the governor's mansion was surrounded with protestors, "[m]ommy called the demonstrators softheads ... [she] said it was an excuse for the radicals and the commies and the softheads to make a fuss, but no judge was going to let off a Black troublemaker who killed a cop." Her father, the current senator, was the prosecutor at the time of the trial and it was he who got the conviction.

Piercy is a rebel in ideology and action. She became politicized when she protested the war in Vietnam and much of her writing reflects her commitment to righting wrongs imposed on individuals. Usually, she writes about women who are struggling to escape whatever confines them. In THE THIRD CHILD, the protagonist is very much trying to stave off the knifelike criticisms heaped on her by her mother, while trying desperately to shed the role she was forced into as the family's scapegoat. Her world is often bewildering, and when she finally graduates from high school and gets to Wesleyan she begins to slowly pull herself away from their dark influence.

"Melissa felt as if she abandoned past selves like snake skins of shame along her bumpy route to adulthood ... she viewed herself as a project under construction, the road all torn up ... [s]he would remake herself ... into somebody strong and important." Unfortunately, Blake, the man she meets and falls in love with, has a hidden agenda that will lead her down a path littered with landmines, searing explosions and irreversible decisions. With his encouragement she begins to slowly investigate her father and his political history.

Blake introduces her to a fellow classmate, Phil, the son of the investigative reporter who ... "had tried for years to smear her father and never succeeded. Phil was engaged in amassing long lists of contributors to [her father's] campaigns and to organizations supporting him. They were looking for interlocking directorates of corporations and institutions to identify the men --- and it was eighty percent men --- who had given and given again, whose pockets were deep for Dick." Slowly, Melissa begins to uncover secrets her parents have worked diligently to keep buried. Her politicization helps foster the tension between protagonist and antagonists. Piercy does more than create suspense; she has molded her characters in perfect relief to each other. Their actions result in repercussions beyond anything each of them could have predicted, thus pummeling them as every event unfolds.

THE THIRD CHILD is a phenomenal story comprised of a carefully thought out thematic structure that is very complex. The issues addressed are many and range from a coming-of-age story, to an intense love story; from a political treatise, to a fully realized novel; from its chilling undertones it often reads like a mystery; and as we move along with Lissa, we see, too, that it has all of the elements of a true bildungsroman. Marge Piercy gives readers a valiant heroine, a young woman who painfully comes to know herself and her family.

This novel is very provocative and resonates with passions that are both restrained and at the same time allowed to run wild. Many of Piercy's novels often end sadly, but that is no reason not to read them and learn from them, to think about them and grow with them. Enjoy!

--- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum

Marge Piercy is a writer like Joyce Carol Oats - a very tight writer, not a word out of place or a dangling plot line or character. Just good writing. (Or good editing).

But Piercy is not as prolific a writer as Oats; her novels are rarer finds than Oats'. Her latest, The Third Child, is up to her previous writings. The two main characters, Melissa and Blake, the doomed lovers, come together with such force that the reader knows early on that all cannot end happily. Melissa, daughter of the parents-from-hell, and Blake, whose parentage is easily surmised early on, carry on the sins of the parents.

Piercy moves easily from family to family, throwing in a third family, Emily's, as sort of a "middle" for the other two extremes in political views. She catches the nuances of a conservative and liberal households well, and the effects that growing up in these households have on the children.

Its a very good novel and character study.

Like many of the other reviewers, I've been a Marge Piercy fan for years. "He, She & It," "City of Darkness, City of Light,", and "Gone to Soldiers" (not to mention much of her poetry) are books I love and come back to over and over again. As a biracial Jewish woman who is active in politics, I couldn't wait to read this book. Once I started, though, I wish I hadn't. Trite, predicatable, cliched, with characters that are uninteresting, hollow stereotypes, there is nothing to recommend this novel. While I don't agree with some of the other reviewers (I found the college discussion of sex typical, not crude, and in my experience it is true that even non-religious Jews often want their children to marry people who are Jewish), I do agree that this book isn't worth bothering to read. Perhaps if I had been 16 when I read this it would have been engrossing, but this is not a book for an adult audience.

I used to enjoy the occassional Marge Piercy book I picked up but I was disappointed in this one for many of the same reasons others have already mentioned. The characters drove me nuts.....couldn't feel empathy towards ANY of them.I wasn't sure if I was supposed to like Blake or not but I did not. Melissa was pathetic. I almost thought Alison might turn out to be a double-agent which could have been interesting..... I was especially annoyed at the dialogue as it struck me as stereotyped.....I guess I'm not with it but I thought Melissa and Emily and other friends were pretty crude when it came to discussing their sex lives. I'm Caucasian with many African-American friends who don't speak like they did in the book. I agree with the reader who complained about Blake's OVERuse of "Babes".....I would have dumped him just for calling me that. I was also annoyed by Nadine's comment about "hope you don't raise your children Christian" when she admitted to not even being a religious Jew. It seemed like an unnecessary dig at Christians without a point.Why in the world should she care? Obviously, for growing up with such progressive adoptive parents, their son missed out on some ethical training if he felt justified to go out and hack into others' computers,USE people for his advantage, lie and MURDER for revenge. About the only part I liked was reading about their house in Georgetown since I lived there for many years. I read about a third and then did something I never do...skipped to the last 75 pgs or so...who knows what I missed....who cares!(not me). I'm glad this wasn't her 1st book b/c I never would have read another.

Okay, so maybe there are a lot of cliches in this book, but the writing is good and there's a real plot! Omigod! After about 200 pages, the end was predictable, but so what? I actually lay on the couch for 90 minutes reading because I really wanted to know how it would end anyhow.

I think Piercy did admirably well for an older adult writing from the point of view of an 18-year old in 2000. Sometimes I cringed at the conversations, but not too much, as I am also an older adult.

Piercy is true to her "lefty" beliefs, applying them even now long after the sixties have ended. I admire that. And some of her metaphors and analogies are excellent. She has the right balance of description and conversation. Blake was believable and not predictable. I liked his parents and his story.

All in all, a satisfying read.

I've been reading Marge Piercy's novels off and on for twenty-some years. "Vida" and "He, She, and It" are among my all-tme favorites reads. "The Third Child" doesn't quite live up to these predecessors, but it has its own virtues.

"The Third Child" is a combination romance, coming-of-age-story, political thriller, social commentary, and psychological portrait. That's a lot of baggage for one novel to carry, which may be why it's only partially successful. Melissa, the heroine, is the neglected third child of a politically prominent family. She is more of a prop than child to her ambitious conservative parents, and, compared to her brothers and sister, a less than satisfactory prop at that. As a college freshman, she feels free of their domination for the first time and tries to create a life for herself without them. Just how successful she is at doing this is debatable, since she quickly meets and falls in love with Blake, a fellow freshman. Melissa finds herself besotted with Blake, who is the mixed-race adopted son of her parents' long-time nemesis and a man with an agenda of his own. Using her own anger at her family, he manipulates her into helping him hack into her family's computer files to find dirt that will bring her father down. The whole thing ends badly, of course, leaving poor Melissa far worse of than she was at the beginning.

Piercy tell the story from Melissa's point of view, so it is her feelings we see. This can make for some frustrating moments for the reader, especially towards the beginning of the book, where Melissa comes across as whiny, albeit whiny for a reason. There are other parts where you just want to yell at her for her naivete--any intelligent reader can tell that Blake is bad news--he's that glittering dangerous object that attracts but destroys. His manipulations are obvious, even though Melissa finds ways of excusing them. One of the great ironies of the book is that poor Melissa, having escaped her controlling parents, has landed in the arms of an equally controlling lover. She may perceive their situation as that of Romeo and Juliet, but is it really? Virtually all parties in the book tell her at some point to beware, to take things slowly. She ignores them all.

There aren't a lot of plot surprises in "The Third Child," although there is a certain amount of suspense in seeing how things unravel. But the pleasure of the novel lies in following Melissa's responses. It's also part of the sadness.