The Third Child : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Blistering political commentary within a L*O*V*E story
Review: First of all, if you're wondering what the comfort level on this book is, I'd say close to her usual - about half that of a typical romance novel. Bring Your Own Comfort - always a good plan with a Piercy novel.

There are two main levels to this novel in my experience with it. The first is emotional/psychological, and is a complex, rich look at how our internal paradigms are created and then maintained, and defended against information to the contrary.

Melissa is perceived by her family to be stupid and foolish, and they treat her accordingly. Their behavior of her hurts her and actually has wounded her and given her a desire to hurt them. She thinks she wants to make them understand her better, to see that she's not like they think she is. But on a certain level she really just wants to cause them pain like they've caused her.

That is the backdrop for her involvement with Blake, a man who completes her and is the antidote for all that ails her.

Seeing everything from Melissa's point of view, we are able to watch as she constructs her perception of reality as Blake comes into her life. He has reason to be using her, she wants to believe he loves her. Which is true? The truth that Melissa builds for herself is resilient, and we get to see how it morphs and survives various challenges as time rolls on.

The other main level this book operates on is - like so much of Marge Piercy's work - the political level. There are two aspects of this that I would like to talk about.

One aspect is the view of the successful, rising Republican Conservative family unit. I totally agree with those who say it is important to have friends who are different from you, in particular politically I believe that having friends of the opposite point of view can give your political awareness a great depth. Well, if Republican Conservatives are not your usual crowd, reading this book can count for two or three of those friends!

Marge Piercy captures the tiniest little details about life in these folks' heads, by taking us along as Melissa attempts to understand her family better. It is fascinatingly revolting. Yuck. Stay close to a shower, wash frequently, and you should be ok.

The other aspect is the political system in this country as a whole. Marge's views have not become more optimistic over the decades, and at this point it's even harder to disagree. Overwhelmingly cynical? I guess that depends on what all you've got on your side to offset her point of view.

Some nuggets I'm stil mulling over are these: that if a person or group is not within an elected officials' group of supporters, that group simply doesn't exist for them. And that politicians are more like each other than they are like the people back home, and that gets truer the longer they are in office. That sounds very cynical, but it can be true to an extent or in certain areas without meaning that the american political system no longer has any validity whatsoever.

Not that the book necessarily completely lets you escape that conclusion, it's just not all carried in that one idea! No, I'm just kidding, you can read this book and still have hope for the future! I can't, but you probably can! No, really, it's ok. Marge gives several offsetting instances - wait, no, she doesn't. But in your own world view you probably have offsetting information that will carry you through this.

I know, before you read this book, write yourself a note about all the ways in which democracy is robust in this country, and the powers that be to protect the rights of the people, all that stuff. Make the list as long as you can before opening this book, then hopefully your list will still have something on it when you're done!

Good luck!

Rating:
Summary: Please!
Review: I have been a Marge Piercy fan for years. Even if she can get a little maudlin and melodramatic at times, her heroines like VIDA and Shira in HE, SHE and IT are among the bravest and most original in contemporary literature. I took THE THIRD CHILD on a trip, eagerly looking forward to a good read from my favorite Jewish woman author. Was I disappointed. More angry than disappointed, really. A soap opera of cliches .I am used to the fact that the men in her books are users of women, conniving and untrustworthy. Sex with women is always better than sex with men. Piercy is married, but is also a lesbian, bisexual? But here the sex is great, the man is... a murderer. This struck me as racist to the extreme. Why would Blake, the son of a convicted murderer (we never know whether he was really guilty) a good-looking and talented college student, be cast as a murderer himself? What is Ms. Piercy saying? That you can't escape your race, your heritage, your genes?And the "political" family (the father a senator who supported the execution of Blake's father) please! Maybe if it were a comedy or satire, but she's playing it straight. I don't much like Republicans either, but I know Piercy is capable of deeper, richer characters whose words and actions ring true.

Rating:
Summary: Didn't like the dialogue
Review: I used to enjoy the occassional Marge Piercy book I picked up but I was disappointed in this one for many of the same reasons others have already mentioned. The characters drove me nuts.....couldn't feel empathy towards ANY of them.I wasn't sure if I was supposed to like Blake or not but I did not. Melissa was pathetic. I almost thought Alison might turn out to be a double-agent which could have been interesting..... I was especially annoyed at the dialogue as it struck me as stereotyped.....I guess I'm not with it but I thought Melissa and Emily and other friends were pretty crude when it came to discussing their sex lives. I'm Caucasian with many African-American friends who don't speak like they did in the book. I agree with the reader who complained about Blake's OVERuse of "Babes".....I would have dumped him just for calling me that. I was also annoyed by Nadine's comment about "hope you don't raise your children Christian" when she admitted to not even being a religious Jew. It seemed like an unnecessary dig at Christians without a point.Why in the world should she care? Obviously, for growing up with such progressive adoptive parents, their son missed out on some ethical training if he felt justified to go out and hack into others' computers,USE people for his advantage, lie and MURDER for revenge. About the only part I liked was reading about their house in Georgetown since I lived there for many years. I read about a third and then did something I never do...skipped to the last 75 pgs or so...who knows what I missed....who cares!(not me). I'm glad this wasn't her 1st book b/c I never would have read another.

Rating:
Summary: Really 3.75
Review: I've been reading Marge Piercy's novels off and on for twenty-some years. "Vida" and "He, She, and It" are among my all-tme favorites reads. "The Third Child" doesn't quite live up to these predecessors, but it has its own virtues.

"The Third Child" is a combination romance, coming-of-age-story, political thriller, social commentary, and psychological portrait. That's a lot of baggage for one novel to carry, which may be why it's only partially successful. Melissa, the heroine, is the neglected third child of a politically prominent family. She is more of a prop than child to her ambitious conservative parents, and, compared to her brothers and sister, a less than satisfactory prop at that. As a college freshman, she feels free of their domination for the first time and tries to create a life for herself without them. Just how successful she is at doing this is debatable, since she quickly meets and falls in love with Blake, a fellow freshman. Melissa finds herself besotted with Blake, who is the mixed-race adopted son of her parents' long-time nemesis and a man with an agenda of his own. Using her own anger at her family, he manipulates her into helping him hack into her family's computer files to find dirt that will bring her father down. The whole thing ends badly, of course, leaving poor Melissa far worse of than she was at the beginning.

Piercy tell the story from Melissa's point of view, so it is her feelings we see. This can make for some frustrating moments for the reader, especially towards the beginning of the book, where Melissa comes across as whiny, albeit whiny for a reason. There are other parts where you just want to yell at her for her naivete--any intelligent reader can tell that Blake is bad news--he's that glittering dangerous object that attracts but destroys. His manipulations are obvious, even though Melissa finds ways of excusing them. One of the great ironies of the book is that poor Melissa, having escaped her controlling parents, has landed in the arms of an equally controlling lover. She may perceive their situation as that of Romeo and Juliet, but is it really? Virtually all parties in the book tell her at some point to beware, to take things slowly. She ignores them all.

There aren't a lot of plot surprises in "The Third Child," although there is a certain amount of suspense in seeing how things unravel. But the pleasure of the novel lies in following Melissa's responses. It's also part of the sadness.

Rating:
Summary: Really 3.75
Review: I've been reading Marge Piercy's novels off and on for twenty-some years. "Vida" and "He, She, and It" are among my all-tme favorites reads. "The Third Child" doesn't quite live up to these predecessors, but it has its own virtues.

"The Third Child" is a combination romance, coming-of-age-story, political thriller, social commentary, and psychological portrait. That's a lot of baggage for one novel to carry, which may be why it's only partially successful. Melissa, the heroine, is the neglected third child of a politically prominent family. She is more of a prop than child to her ambitious conservative parents, and, compared to her brothers and sister, a less than satisfactory prop at that. As a college freshman, she feels free of their domination for the first time and tries to create a life for herself without them. Just how successful she is at doing this is debatable, since she quickly meets and falls in love with Blake, a fellow freshman. Melissa finds herself besotted with Blake, who is the mixed-race adopted son of her parents' long-time nemesis and a man with an agenda of his own. Using her own anger at her family, he manipulates her into helping him hack into her family's computer files to find dirt that will bring her father down. The whole thing ends badly, of course, leaving poor Melissa far worse of than she was at the beginning.

Piercy tell the story from Melissa's point of view, so it is her feelings we see. This can make for some frustrating moments for the reader, especially towards the beginning of the book, where Melissa comes across as whiny, albeit whiny for a reason. There are other parts where you just want to yell at her for her naivete--any intelligent reader can tell that Blake is bad news--he's that glittering dangerous object that attracts but destroys. His manipulations are obvious, even though Melissa finds ways of excusing them. One of the great ironies of the book is that poor Melissa, having escaped her controlling parents, has landed in the arms of an equally controlling lover. She may perceive their situation as that of Romeo and Juliet, but is it really? Virtually all parties in the book tell her at some point to beware, to take things slowly. She ignores them all.

There aren't a lot of plot surprises in "The Third Child," although there is a certain amount of suspense in seeing how things unravel. But the pleasure of the novel lies in following Melissa's responses. It's also part of the sadness.

Rating:
Summary: "Our path is together. Don't you know that yet?"
Review: It is difficult to characterize this novel. It's certainly a coming-of-age novel, tracing, as it does, Melissa Dickinson's life from age 17 - 19, and it's certainly a political novel in the sense that it focuses on her relationship with her father, a conservative senator from Pennsylvania and former two-term governor, a proponent of the death penalty who oversaw several executions. It's also a "suspense" novel in that it involves research into possible corruption, with a grand climax in the last ten pages. Thin on character, it is also more theatrical than subtle--easy to imagine as a film or TV program.

The third child in a political family which does not have enough time for her, Melissa Dickinson is a bright student who goes off to a fine university in Connecticut. There she immediately meets a handsome young man who, for reasons she cannot fathom (but which the reader will immediately guess), sweeps her off her feet and engages her in an overwhelming, passionate affair. She soon discovers that he is the son of a lawyer who represented a convicted murderer executed during her father's term. He wants to "research" her father and collect data about him, and she, resenting the family dynamics, which do not recognize her as an individual, agrees to help her lover.

Romantic and melodramatic, the novel depends on the reader's belief that the daughter of a two-term governor who is now a senator and friend of the President really could be as naive as Melissa is. Though she is seventeen, supposedly has scored 1460 on her SATs, and has attended fine schools, she apparently has no curiosity whatever about government or education in basic civics, referring, at one point, to the Secretary of the Interior--"whatever that meant." Her point of view is reflected in short, simple sentences, like that of a much younger teenager, until she begins her relationship with Blake Ackerman, when her sentences get longer, though she continues to think in cliches: "She felt as if he were the only person she had ever known who saw what she needed."

As the data-gathering on her father continues, Melissa still remains completely naive, suspecting neither motives nor actions, even when they involve computers, hidden keys, floor plans, and vows of secrecy. Most readers, however, will guess the plot complications before they happen. Though some sympathy may be generated for Melissa, she and the other characters are stereotypical, rather than unique, and they behave according to form. The grand climax, when it happens, may be less grand for some readers than they had hoped. Mary Whipple

Rating:
Summary: A waste of my time
Review: It's rare for me not to finish a book, but I only got to about page 140 of this one. My one requirement for novels is that I must be able to care about the characters. They must get inside my head and linger there long after I've closed the book--they don't have to be likable, just well drawn and multi-layered.

After 140 pages of The Third Child, I did not care one whit about these characters and in fact found them grating on my nerves. Melissa comes off as extremely whiny, needy, and unappreciative of what she's been given. Granted, her parents (stereotypical treatments themselves of a politician and his dominant wife) have not made her the center of their universe, but she didn't exactly make me want to root for her with her constant griping about how horrible her life is. The whole Dickinson sibling set is also stereotypical: the good son, the obedient daughter, the neglected daughter, the rebellious boy.

And don't even get me started on Blake. This is supposed to be an 18-year-old college freshman? Please. He's a condescending jerk who treats Melissa like his property.

Also, when was this story set? I assumed modern day, but one of Melissa's classmates actually says, "She wouldn't be down with it." I haven't heard that phrase since the 1970s. This was just one of several inconsistencies that irritated me. And if Blake called Melissa "babes" one more time, I think I might have lost my lunch.

Instead, I just regretted the time I spent reading this drivel and started in on "The Namesake" by Jhumpa Lahiri. Now there's a novel with complex characters.

Rating:
Summary: Another great read from Piercy
Review: Marge Piercy is a writer like Joyce Carol Oats - a very tight writer, not a word out of place or a dangling plot line or character. Just good writing. (Or good editing).

But Piercy is not as prolific a writer as Oats; her novels are rarer finds than Oats'. Her latest, The Third Child, is up to her previous writings. The two main characters, Melissa and Blake, the doomed lovers, come together with such force that the reader knows early on that all cannot end happily. Melissa, daughter of the parents-from-hell, and Blake, whose parentage is easily surmised early on, carry on the sins of the parents.

Piercy moves easily from family to family, throwing in a third family, Emily's, as sort of a "middle" for the other two extremes in political views. She catches the nuances of a conservative and liberal households well, and the effects that growing up in these households have on the children.

Its a very good novel and character study.

Rating:
Summary: An intriguing story of ambition and love
Review: Marge Piercy's The Third Child is a coming-of-age story tells of a prominent family where ambition comes first and third child Melissa has always felt she comes last. Her freedom at college leads her to Blake, a man of mixed race and unknown parentage, and a fiery affair which hides a secret which could destroy both their families. The Third Child is an intriguing story of ambition and love.

Rating:
Summary: A Phenomenal, Provocative and Passionate Story
Review: Melissa Dickinson was in her senior year at Miss Porter's School in Connecticut. "In her father's family ... the women always attended Miss Porter's --- even her, no matter how far down the family hierarchy she was rated. Her father wanted to be President, and her mother was determined to get him there. Daddy's importance was like a family member, bigger and even more visible than her two older siblings, Richard IV" ... an ambitious younger version of his politician father ... and her sister, smart, beautiful, lawyer-to-be Merilee. Her younger sibling Billy was the rebel but he had an edge that made him "acceptable" because he was handsome and smart. As the third child among the four, Lissa felt like a misfit. She had failed before she started in this family. And as the "outsider" she had taken an objective view of her family and she didn't particularly like what she was saw. In her position "she was powerless, but she could try to place them in perspective, she could learn and criticize, silently, stealthily. With [her parents] all was stealth."

Marge Piercy, who has written fifteen novels, sixteen books of poetry, a writing manual, a play, a memoir, a collection of essays and has edited an anthology of poetry written by American women opens her latest novel, THE THIRD CHILD, by introducing the reader to the Dickinson clan through the eyes of the story's mixed-up, unhappy, and very lonely heroine. Now that she was eighteen ... "she had gradually come to understand things that had been encoded and hidden when she had been young and naïve. Her past with her parents rewrote itself as she gathered knowledge, as the landscape of her childhood mutated out of ... blue skies to a landscape with shadows and dark pits and hidden fires burning," under the imperfect reality of her powerful parents. This form of narrative works perfectly; especially when she gives us hints of what we can expect to emerge as the novel unfolds.

"The first big event Melissa remembered after her father had become governor (of Pennsylvania) was an execution. The prisoner's name was Toussaint Parker, and he had killed a policeman." On the night he was to be put to death, the governor's mansion was surrounded with protestors, "[m]ommy called the demonstrators softheads ... [she] said it was an excuse for the radicals and the commies and the softheads to make a fuss, but no judge was going to let off a Black troublemaker who killed a cop." Her father, the current senator, was the prosecutor at the time of the trial and it was he who got the conviction.

Piercy is a rebel in ideology and action. She became politicized when she protested the war in Vietnam and much of her writing reflects her commitment to righting wrongs imposed on individuals. Usually, she writes about women who are struggling to escape whatever confines them. In THE THIRD CHILD, the protagonist is very much trying to stave off the knifelike criticisms heaped on her by her mother, while trying desperately to shed the role she was forced into as the family's scapegoat. Her world is often bewildering, and when she finally graduates from high school and gets to Wesleyan she begins to slowly pull herself away from their dark influence.

"Melissa felt as if she abandoned past selves like snake skins of shame along her bumpy route to adulthood ... she viewed herself as a project under construction, the road all torn up ... [s]he would remake herself ... into somebody strong and important." Unfortunately, Blake, the man she meets and falls in love with, has a hidden agenda that will lead her down a path littered with landmines, searing explosions and irreversible decisions. With his encouragement she begins to slowly investigate her father and his political history.

Blake introduces her to a fellow classmate, Phil, the son of the investigative reporter who ... "had tried for years to smear her father and never succeeded. Phil was engaged in amassing long lists of contributors to [her father's] campaigns and to organizations supporting him. They were looking for interlocking directorates of corporations and institutions to identify the men --- and it was eighty percent men --- who had given and given again, whose pockets were deep for Dick." Slowly, Melissa begins to uncover secrets her parents have worked diligently to keep buried. Her politicization helps foster the tension between protagonist and antagonists. Piercy does more than create suspense; she has molded her characters in perfect relief to each other. Their actions result in repercussions beyond anything each of them could have predicted, thus pummeling them as every event unfolds.

THE THIRD CHILD is a phenomenal story comprised of a carefully thought out thematic structure that is very complex. The issues addressed are many and range from a coming-of-age story, to an intense love story; from a political treatise, to a fully realized novel; from its chilling undertones it often reads like a mystery; and as we move along with Lissa, we see, too, that it has all of the elements of a true bildungsroman. Marge Piercy gives readers a valiant heroine, a young woman who painfully comes to know herself and her family.

This novel is very provocative and resonates with passions that are both restrained and at the same time allowed to run wild. Many of Piercy's novels often end sadly, but that is no reason not to read them and learn from them, to think about them and grow with them. Enjoy!

--- Reviewed by Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum