[In the following review, Wheeler offers unfavorable assessment of Fly Away Home.]

Fly Away Home is a novel I much wanted to like, and there is much in the novel to admire. It's a novel that says much without taking a preachy tone, and it's a novel that has something to say. It's also a novel of human experience and human scale, one that takes problems of our age and time and domesticates them. It is written by a woman, about a woman and for women, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.

In fact, its virtues may do this novel in. For example, there's author Marge Piercy's obvious skill in the creation of a detailed fictional world. She not only knows every inch of the house her heroine, Daria Walker, occupies and loves, she also knows every piece of underwear in her drawer and every thought in her head.

Each detail Piercy presents has behind it the richness of a thousand others. The result is an enormous strength of the parts but also a weakness of the whole. The details are perfect, but they add up to one woman's life rather than a fully realized novel.

Here again Piercy's virtues point up her failings. Daria Walker is a wonderful character. She's essentially good without being perfect, perceptive without being preternaturally wise, gentle without being mushy, she is, in fact, extraordinary enough to be interesting yet average enough to be representative. She is also, unfortunately, the only complete character in the book. There's some real humanity in her two daughters, her secretary and some of the tenants of the buildings her husband owns, but these characters seem cardboard when compared to Daria.

There are also some characters who would seem cardboard if compared to a box at a checkout counter. The husband who discards her, for example, is not only guilty of bad taste. He turns out to have the charm of bubble gum on the bottom of a shoe and about the same amount of intrinsic merit. Piercy is making a point about how two individuals can grow apart in a marriage, but it could have been made without turning one of those individuals into a snob, a bully and a vicarious pyromaniac with homicidal tendencies.

The problem of Daria's husband brings up, quite naturally, the greatest of this novel's vices of virtue. Piercy has points to make, several of them. She is not only writing about estrangement in a long marriage and what the 1980s can do to a man and a woman who seemed to have much in common in the 1960s, she's also writing about how money can corrupt the weak, how evil can be seen as necessary and how times of crisis can turn into times of self-discovery and, therefore, self-fulfillment.

Now these are all valid concerns for a novelist and merit thoughtful exploration. Piercy, however, doesn't give them one. Long before Daria and her new lover—younger, stronger, bigger, sexier and infinitely more sensitive than that creep who was her husband—have fantastic sex, this novel may seem more an exercise in wish-fulfillment than self-fulfillment. The line between the two is subtle, but many readers will have little doubt that Piercy has crossed it.