I'd like to propose a program of civil rights for characters in novels. I don't think it is fair for authors to push them around or malign them just to make a point or put across a message….

Marge Piercy's … novel, "The High Cost of Living," leads me to these reflections. In it she creates just one interesting character—and then destroys him. Not because the logic of his life or his circumstances demands it, because it is dramatically inevitable, but for reasons that I can only conjecture, and that, from all appearances, would seem to be polemical.

In "The High Cost of Living" Leslie, a young lesbian, and Bernie, a young male homosexual, struggle for the affections of Honor, a pretentious 17-year-old virgin. Although neither Leslie nor Bernie will admit it, Honor is so stultifyingly silly that they are more or less forced into an appreciation of each other….

After some rather touching blundering, Leslie and Bernie make love. I found the scene appealing—not because they have "straightened out," but because their love-making develops out of a friendship that is strong enough to surmount difficulties. For a few hours, they are happy, which I am old-fashioned and sentimental enough to enjoy. Then Miss Piercy turns Bernie into an extremely unpleasant creature who is a contradiction of everything that has been happening to him. He becomes a tool for tightening the nuts and bolts of the author's sociology of sex. While Leslie is open to change, Bernie is the leopard, or leper, who cannot change his spots. When the three other men in the novel are exposed as compulsive lechers, one begins to sense a prejudice.

It would take a brave man, in the present social climate, to suggest that male homosexuals in novels tend to be wittier than female ones. Yet it does seem so emphatically true of Bernie and Leslie that I began to wonder whether Miss Piercy might not regard wit as a vice….

Miss Piercy herself does not often condescend to wit, and the felicities of a decent prose style are inconsistent with her seriousness….

At the end of the book, we leave Leslie, who has a black belt in karate, teaching militant women to defend themselves. Defend themselves against whom? I'm tempted to say against Miss Piercy.