Vida Asch is the center of [Vida]. Beautiful, passionate, capable, the most popular of the Upper West Side revolutionaries, Vida has been a fugitive for nearly 10 years now…. As the novel progresses we see how unreal Vida has become to those in the world she left behind. She no longer exists except inside the fugitive life. (p. 43)

We experience Vida's exhaustion and confusion, her yearning for rest and legality, for an end to a life she knows is merely survival. But, dominated by the stubborn determination like that of a patriotic prisoner of war not to be taken, not to give up or give in, not to let "them" win, she hunches her shoulders and disappears into the winter night: a resister to the end.

Piercy accomplishes two things in this novel. She evokes very affectingly the raw pull of revolutionary politics that took hold of so many people in the '60s, the open wound those years left in them. And she also evokes (through the love affair between Vida and the army deserter) the fierce and fatal isolation of the fugitive. If this were a European novel, the latter would have provided the book with its dominating metaphor: but as it is an American novel, the former is the symbolic landscape on which the characters are planted. The idea of the '60s is still the barbed hook on which Marge Piercy is hung: immobilized, unchanged, unchanging—a condition whose power and limitation are both obvious.

The war between radical America and capitalist America is real enough, both actually and metaphorically. But to insist on the mythic quality of the self-styled Marxist revolutionaries of the American '60s—as though they were our Yugoslav partisans or French Resistance workers—that simply will not wash. There is neither sufficient substance to the original political history or to the subsequent spiritual legacy. Vida Asch and her comrades are a parody of the Old Left when the Old Left was already a parody of itself…. Nothing in the thought or feeling of the contemporary radicals indicates that 40 vital years separate them from their political forebears—years in which atomic physics, psychoanalysis, and American civil rights have permanently changed the self-definition of the world we lurch about in, straining to understand who and where we are. Nothing—not even the feminism to which strong lip service is paid—is as real and as centered in Vida as a narrow, old-fashioned sense of class struggle and revolutionary resistance. Being underground is, indeed, the proper euphemism for a state of emotional arrest much in evidence here.

And yet, Vida has a certain power. The book's true subject—neither revolution nor resistance—is the enormous longing that infuses radical politics. It's the revolutionary life Piercy can't let go of—the richness of its promise, the special quality of the comradeship, the yearning behind the solidarity. That is real enough, and for all its intellectual foolishness, Vida captures it wonderfully. (pp. 43-4)