[Once inside Marge Piercy's "Going Down Fast"] you find a lively, vital montage of the protest establishment, Chicago style. The title implies a downbeat motif: a callously conceived university housing project slamming into a poor neighborhood thickly seeded with the intelligentsia. But before the walls come tumbling down, Miss Piercy exhibits some life styles that offer a low enough silhouette to survive urban demolition….

Miss Piercy fills a rapidly shifting scene with well-defined characters, and attunes them to the swing of the wreckers' ball…. [She] gets beneath the skins of her dramatis personae, black and white. Some transient trappings notwithstanding, the motivation of Rowley and Anna is as durable as what moved Tristan and Isolde.