I read ‘The High Cost of Living’ because Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and City of Darkness, City of Light impressed me so much. This novel is neither historic nor utopian, taking place in rather grim 1970s Detroit. ‘The High Cost of Living’ is told from the point of view of Leslie, a postgraduate student, lesbian, and black belt in karate. The narrative is introspective rather than rife with drama and centres on Leslie’s friendships with Honor and Bernie. The three of them are very different people, but their complicated friendship felt plausible and interesting to me. I became fond of Leslie, who is obliged to obey the dictates of her PhD supervisor despite resenting his privilege and success. Although set in the 1970s, the gender roles played out in this novel seem depressingly familiar. Academia still remains dominated by straight white men. Moreover, interesting questions of intersectional feminism crop up, both with regard to race and class. Leslie and others are conscious of trying to claw their way up to the middle class through education, resenting those already there all the while. They do not want to become the same people that they resent, but that is the only route out of poverty and model of success that they have. An ambivalent range of perspectives on the merit of academic aptitude are advanced by different characters, which I found intriguing.Overall, I found this novel thought-provoking and liked the majority of it very much. Nonetheless, some developments in the relationship between Leslie and Bernie made me uncomfortable. The novel asks questions about the differences between intimacy and sex, but in ways that I didn’t really like. That is personal preference, though. My other quibble is related - there is one sex scene in the book which is written in florid and rather bizarre terms. I simply cannot take the phrase, 'hot and passionate as little piglets' remotely seriously. Maybe the reader isn’t supposed to? I think the book deserves four stars, though, because Piercy is such a genuinely interesting writer. Very few books deal so well with issues of friendship, queerness, class, and intersectionality today, let alone in the 1970s. Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe that’s when such books were written and I am falling into the trap of assuming that the current moment is better than the past. That may well not be the case.
