[In the following review, Casey offers qualified praise for The Longings of Women.]

If this tale of three heroines is to be believed, then the answer to the question “What do women want?” is, simply, a house. According to Marge Piercy, what women long for is shelter with an affordable mortgage. If this doesn't sound particularly literary or inspiring, you should understand that Piercy doesn't give a damn about literary or inspiring. Harsh truths are what Piercy cares for; she has no taste or talent for what John Updike calls “fiction's shapely lies.” The plot—for each of Piercy's heroines—is: Woman Meets House. Woman Loses House. Woman Gets House. （In one case, perhaps The Big House.）

Piercy's three heroines appear in descending order of net worth and ascending order of interest. The most well-off and least engaging is Leila, 45, who teaches sociology and writes about women in prison. Her husband is a theater director who has affairs—close to one a year over the course of 20 years of marriage—which Leila tolerates.

Piercy's second heroine, Becky, 25, was one of seven children growing up in a poor New Bedford household with one bathroom. The first in her family to go to college, Becky marries a dull man （with well-heeled parents） to gain respectability—specifically, a sunny shingled condo on the Cape, where with joyful proprietariness she cleans the bathroom grout with a toothbrush. A Becky Sharp for our era, this Becky, derives her values from the Shopping Channel and inane motivational tapes. She is certainly calculating and self-centered （her brother's death at sea makes her feel like a celebrity） but we're not so sure she's capable of plotting with her teen lover to kill her husband. Becky and Leila meet when Leila begins a book about the case; Piercy keeps Leila and the reader in suspense for a while about Becky's guilt.

The poorest of the novel's characters is Piercy's star. Mary, 61, has been house-cleaning for Boston families, including Leila's, since she was left by her husband and lost her clerical job. She's dependable, respectably dressed and hard working. So hard-working that she can finish a six-hour cleaning job in three hours and lie down for the rest of her time alone in the house. A necessity because Mary is homeless, burned out of her apartment. Her clients think she lives with her daughter somewhere in Boston. In fact, her daughter lives with spouse and children in Chevy Chase and sends the occasional check to Mary's post-office box.

When concentrating on Mary, Piercy's militant sympathy and her eye for concrete detail are used to best effect. Mary usually sleeps at Logan Airport or in a church basement. She takes care always to keep her few possessions in an unwrinkled bag （crumpled shopping bags draw police attention）. She subsists on spoonfuls of cornflakes or granola or leftover soup from clients' cupboards. A few nights a month she can afford a motel room; mostly she bathes with paper towels in restrooms.

Most vividly rendered is the tedium of having to kill time by walking around, of never being able to sit down for long. One of Mary's airport tactics is to seek out a delayed flight so that she can rest surrounded by other tired, dejected-looking people.

How did she end up homeless? It's a question many women ask themselves when they see women begging on the street, fearing that some misfortune could land them there, too. A college graduate, Mary was married to a civil-servant, and entertained his colleagues in her Bethesda Home. Her husband now lives comfortably with his third wife and second set of children; the injustice of the situation is not lost on Mary.

Marry a professional man, older women had advised Mary in her youth. Now, she thinks, “They should have said, be a caterer, buy a property and pay it off fast. Never mind the rest.”

With all the timely power of Mary's story, why should we care about the gracelessness of Piercy's writing? There are popularisms like, “Being married and having his own life and his own home were just not priorities.” There are Judith Krantzisms like, “She put on the red silk Victoria's Secret nightgown he had given her for her birthday two years before, rather than the flannel Eileen West she usually wore.” And there are even saccharine cute cat-isms. Of Leila's newly adopted tom, Piercy writes, “He did not feel it was too soon to begin that vital training that lubricated the loving relationship between the cat and the person he owned.” And there are chats we doubt ever got chatted. Establishing her credentials to a source, Leila explains: “I believe I've had a small influence in legislation concerning the rights of women in prison vis-a-vis their children in three states.” When the author's voice is this artless and humorless, it shakes the reader's faith in her judgment, especially her sense of proportion. （Not to mention that Piercy seems to lack sympathy for 49 percent of the human race. The lovable cat has been fixed.）

Piercy has always been an unapologetic ideologue. Her first popular book, Small Changes, brought to life the discontents outlined in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Interestingly, the best of her 11 novels is a work of science fiction, Woman on the Edge of Time, in which Piercy was freed from realism. Then her heroine was a mental patient who could escape forward in time. Reading Piercy's descriptions of Mary's life in The Longings of Women is like reading science fiction. In this case, science fiction about time travel to some nearly unthinkable future in which people have no homes and have to live on the streets. More than unhappily, this does occur in our present and is no fiction. The Longings of Women is not a book for the ages, but it is a book for this exact moment.