[For] all its length and its large cast of characters [Vida] tells us little that we don't already know about radical politics in America. The novel is named for its central character, Davida Asch, a radical political activist who has gone underground with the comrades of her sect and travels back and forth across the country, a fugitive. (p. 38)

It ought to have made an exciting book.

Instead, Piercy, who dedicates her work to "the street and alley soldiers," has written an excessively long, rambling, often tedious book, which depends on her sweeping, uncritical acceptance of the Network's version of radical politics….

Vida's work and that of her comrades in the Network, as reflected in the novel, is pathetically simple. In the 1970s, when the present novel takes place, only survival counts, both for each comrade alone and for the sect. Back in the more distant past of 1967 the sect was militantly active and the story recalls that time as a blur of chaotic events, with recognizable dangers but with no definable point to it. For Piercy, the approach of a political issue or argument signals a precipitous descent into slogans…. The characters rant more than speak, sounding like naive parodies of radicals.

It is hard to believe that this is serious business, especially when Piercy continually reduces politics from several simple notions to one basically crude one. Everything about the America outside the Network is taken for granted. The Establishment is bad; what's radical is good. There's a curious blandness about the real faults and problems of America, as if their reality is too tedious to be described. The result is a sad but genuine isolation….

A picture as unsympathetic to reason and good will (not to speak of liberal political principles) as this one is needs more than authenticity to be effective as fiction. It needs the keen, unsparing eye of the novelist, an unflinching intelligence that evaluates what it sees.

What vitality the novel has depends almost entirely on Vida herself. (p. 39)

The most interesting accomplishment of Piercy's in the novel is not to make Vida an old-fashioned "woman as life-force" character, but to see in her a "new woman." Vida is an adventuress, risking an unconventional acceptance of her own needs, a present-day Moll Flanders who fervently believes her goals are valid because they are hers. Piercy admires this side of Vida, but is capable of a shrewdness about her protagonist that escapes her in the rest of the novel…. Vida's energetic uncertainty, when contrasted with the flat, unprofitable political clichés of the rest of the book, seems that much more appealing. (p. 40)