Marge Piercy is full of exhortation. Her first novel ["Going Down Fast"]—about urban "renewal," the radical community, the tab-top non-calorific managerial class in Chicago—seizes you by the lapels (or the dashiki) and flings you into a bomb site. Her "fate" is man-made, a compound of power and venality; her method, a relentless exactitude, a Doris Lessing like accumulation of raw detail.

"Going Down Fast" refers both to buildings under the wrecker's ball and to the people living in those buildings, the permanently evicted. From multiple points of view Miss Piercy tells the interconnected stories of two young female teachers (Jewish, black), a blues singer, a welfare caseworker, an underground filmmaker. Their deceptions and accommodations weave in and out of a political essay vividly describing how real estate promoters, social scientists and a university make war not for, but on, the poor.

Miss Piercy has previously published two books of poetry. Her gift attends her here, in evoking the awful grandeur of steel towns, the sexual magic of money, the claustrophobia of refuge, the desperation of the self-seeking and the self-deceived. That her characters should derive from their experience madness or death or radical commitment flows convincingly from the logic of the "fat" nation she examines.

Given our technology, Miss Piercy is saying, we no longer need a labor pool of the unskilled. Organized, such a labor pool (such Luddites, allied with ideologues) might inconvenience the mechanisms of consumption. We are, she says, prepared to rid ourselves of this inconvenience, while wearing our pieties like boutonnieres. I believe her, and her savage novel.