[In the following essay, Wynn offers praise for Gone to Soldiers.]

Intricately braided plots, salt-of-the-earth characters, hearty cuisine and copulation down among the counterculture—these are a few of Marge Piercy's favorite things.

Then there's her civil rights and women's liberation activism—as well as her regularly voiced conviction that the United States is steering a rocky, vainglorious course to disaster. In Fly Away Home, the heroine's once-idealistic slumlord husband tried to obtain his goals by burning down his own house. Woman on the Edge of Time posited a hellish futuristic America run entirely by and for the “Rockemellons” and the “DukePonts.” Piercy has been accused of writing didactic potboilers yet, for her, art is always political.

Her latest, Gone To Soldiers—which answers the musical question, “Where have all the young men gone?”—is Piercy's most gripping, ambitious work to date. Although the story gets off to a ponderous start as the author erects her complex superstructure and limns the historical background in passages that are occasionally redolent of the research stacks, all in all she's done a skillful job interweaving the adventures of six young women and four young men caught up in the military/political cataclysm of World War II.

Unlike Herman Wouk's World War II epic, “Winds of War,” there are no portraits herein of the Great: Roosevelt, Churchill, etc. Instead, Piercy studs her narrative with cameos of little-known movers and shakers: aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran, founder of the Women's Air Force Service Pilots （WASP）; cryptanalyst William Friedman, who broke Japan's diplomatic code in 1940.

As the story opens, the Great Depression has given way to wartime boom. The United States is fighting for survival, its eastern coast littered with debris from American casualties to German U-boats. But even this worthy conflict, our last “good” war, is full of contradictions. And Piercy misses few of them. Although at war with racist Nazis, Washington, D.C., of the early 1940s is an overgrown Southern town, segregated down to its last toilet and drinking fountain. Race riots rage in Detroit. Jew-baiting divides U.S. soldiers in the Pacific theater.

As for American women—yes, the war transforms their lot for the duration; millions enter the mainstream labor force though most of them will be sluffed off after VJ Day by a postwar economy that no longer needs them.

It's against this strife-torn background of social upheaval that Piercy turns to what she does best: unleashing a diverse cast of characters to ricochet off one another in various unexpected ways.

First come the New York intellectuals and think-tank specialists. Energetic Louise Kahan writes popular romances and leftwing journalism. As a government propagandist, she reluctantly uses guilt and glamor images to sell the war to American women. In between assignments, Louise wrangles with her ex-husband （Imagine “His Girl Friday” with a Jewish Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant）, rides hard on her bobby-soxer daughter, and beds down a young decoder who works for the OSS, a CIA forerunner. She will eventually cover the liberation of Paris for Colliers magazine and view the Nazis' grisly treasure-horde of Jewish plunder in defeated Germany.

Meanwhile, out in the American heartland, another sexual triangle develops among spinster Bernice and her secret-agent brother's lover, Zach, who helps supply the French Resistance. Zach teaches Bernice to fly planes and considers her a pretty good lay for a woman; she runs off to join the WASPs, concluding that, on the whole, she'd rather be a man, too.

And finally, there's the Parisian Jewish Levy-Monot family who are scattered—some into concentration camps, some into hiding—when the Nazis enter France. Rebellious teenager Jacqueline becomes a hero of the Pyrenees-based Jewish Resistance before she's abducted to Germany. Her little sister Naomi is smuggled past hostile U.S. immigration authorities to live with working class relatives in Detroit.

Piercy is boldly incisive, whether depicting Auschwitz savagery or domestic terrorism in the “normal” American household. Margaret Atwood once observed that Piercy's vigorous, occasionally awkward diction suggests that she has never taken a creative writing class. If not, that lapse may partly account for her unselfconscious, forward-thrusting narrative pace, which steadily accelerates through Gone To Soldiers as cliffhanger follows riveting cliffhanger. Capture, escape, exhilaration and despair and brutal holocaust follow in masterful order, capped by a disturbing picture of Americans fighting their way—first and foremost—to a higher living standard, into “an advertisement full of objects they had coveted but never owned and seldom even touched.”

Gone To Soldiers presents aspects of a World War II that are antithetical to late-show movie nostalgia. Piercy's war may not be the “good” fight one prefers to remember, but it happened, too, and Gone To Soldiers brings it vividly home.