The Third Child

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.

One doesn't pick up a Marge Piercy novel for some mindless entertainment. Piercy, a deeply committed and passionate author and poet, has something to say--and she has done so strongly and well in her many novels.So I knew going in that I was going to have an unforgettable experience, as many of Piercy's novels have never left my consciousness, most notably, "Vida" and "Braided Lives," among others. Nevertheless, I was not prepared for the brutal read that is "The Third Child."When I say "brutal," I am not referring to violence or mayhem, although one could certainly make a case for psychological violence in this plot ... Melissa Dickinson, who considers herself too tall, too fat, and altogether lumpish, thanks to her shrew of a mother, is the third of four chidren in the picture-perfect family of her father, Senator Dick Dickinson. We gather that the senator is an arch conservative, whose wife (and Melissa's uncaring mother), Rosemary, a small-boned, brittle beauty, is the power behind the throne. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop Rosemary in her constant and obsessive push to further her husband's career all the way to the presidency. Every aspect of Melissa's life is a photo op. Otherwise, she sees nothing of her father, and her mother only communicates to criticize.So it is no wonder, then, that when Melissa finally escapes to college, she falls heavily and hard for just the "wrong type of boy" in her mother's eyes, had her mother known about the romance. Blake is 19, like Melissa, a gorgeous black man who was adopted and raised by a prominent Jewish famiy and who considers himself Jewish as well. A double whammy for the oh-so-WASP Dickinsons. But Melissa is besotted with Blake, madly passionately in love as only a first love can be. Too bad the reader is not--there is something just a bit off with this boy, and the reader is at a loss to know what it is.Here is Piercy's genius coming through. The Dickinson matriarch is such a horrible, manipulative and terrible person, that the reader is loathe to take any opinion that would in any way coincide with hers. And yet as a mother of a 19-year-old daughter, all I could think as a reader was, "get away from this boy! He's no good!" And yet I didn't know why.This sense of unease grows throughout the book to an almost unbearable level as we see the insidious manipulation of Melissa from all sides, even when we can't figure out what it's about. The ending is explosive and troubling in the extreme.This is a scathing indictment of politics in America, no matter what the political party. It makes any reader stop and think, especially in an election year...I recommend it to everybody, no matter how liberal or conservative they may be. Another triumph for Piercy, who simply gets better and better with every book she writes.

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 ro

The Third child is an absolutely riveting and sensational melodrama. I just loved this book. Nothing about this story can be taken seriously, but this doesn't really matter because you will be enormously entertained by the over-the-top scenario. Yes - The Third Child is a literary thriller, a love story and a saga of espionage, but the novel also offers us some insights into political corruption and the ramifications of family lies and betrayal.Melissa Dickinson is the neglected, needy third child of Republican senator Dick Dickinson and his cold, scheming wife, Rosemary. In her first year at Wesleyan College, she meets Blake Ackerman, a classmate who is both dark-skinned and Jewish, qualities sure to distress her parents. They fall into an intensely symbiotic relationship fueled by sexual compatibility as well as by Melissa's resentment of her emotionally inaccessible family who are "over-the-top" in their conservatism and their efforts to keep up appearances. Blake's desire for vengeance for his dead father, which includes hacking into Melissa's parents' computer to find evidence that might destroy her father's career, has ramifications that destroy almost everyone in the novel. As the narrative is told from Melissa's view, we get an emotional roller coaster of thoughts and views, as she shifts alliances and realizes that her family are stifling her and not giving her the emotional support that she wants. Rosemary the archetypal control freak, never bothers to give Melissa affection; " she monitors Melissa - "she puts up fence posts and strings barbed wire." And as the story progresses we get a feeling of inevitable doom as Blake and her start to meddle in political cover-ups that spiral out of their control. The effects of lies, deceit and betrayal are at the thematic core of this novel. Melissa lies to her mother and father, her best friend Emily, her lover Blake, and her siblings. And Blake, in turn, lies to Emily and his family, the consequences of this are that no one is ever as they seem, as loyalties of friends and family shift and blur. This is a terrific piece of work, and is almost reminiscent of Donna Tartt's A Secret History in tone and content. You won't be able to put The Third Child down. Michael

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.