Gone to Soldiers
by Marge Piercy
Fawcett Books, 1995
Reivew by Janet Goldwasser
Gone to Soldiers is a work of fiction, with all the usual disclaimers denying
any resemblance to actual persons. But it is also a meticulously researched
academic work which concludes with three pages of acknowledgments to
historians, Holocaust survivors and retired trade union organizers. Marge
Piercy has done her homework and produced a book which the CD Book Club can
confidently recommend. Be forewarned that when you start this sevenÐhundredÐ
page book you are entering a serious relationship with ten individual
characters, each of whom is the focus of numerous chapters set at different
points in time. This book is like a slide show set in prose. You see a
snapshot of one character, move to one after another at that same point in
time and then repeat the process with a new series of snapshots at a later
point. This is an unusual style, but Marge Piercy carries it off very well.
(I confess that sometimes I followed one character by jumping forward several
chapters and then back-tracked to catch up on the other story lines.) I
first read this book in the summer of 1988 and reÐread it this summer. It
holds up well on reÐreading. Since I knew the general plot and the fate of
many of the characters, I was able to read more leisurely than I had on first
reading and appreciate how skillfully Marge Piercy constructed the story.
While it is the young men who have "gone to soldiers", the majority of the
book is about young women in the years of World War II. It is told clearly
from a woman's perspective. Many sections read like transcriptions of
interviews the author conducted with women who actually lived the lives she
has fictionalized.
This book drives home the point that World War II took its toll not just on
soldiers but also on the women at home. As Australian songwriter Judy Small
has observed, "It's not only men in uniform who pay the price of war." In
Gone to Soldiers we see the price in terms of disrupted lives and the death of
loved ones. But we also see the window of opportunities inadvertently opened
by the war: Bernice escapes a domineering father to train as a pilot, Ruth
gets a semi-skilled factory job which pays for her college education; Louise
moves from a writer of pulp fiction to a journalist reporting the closing days
of World War II. The book has the added bonus of a local Detroit connection:
Marge Piercy is a U of M graduate who was born and raised in Detroit. The
book is filled with local references, and I recommend the book as good
historical background on the metropolitan area. But don't let this academic
recommendation scare you off. The stories in the book intertwine and it is a
gripping, wellÐwritten novel.
5
stars out of 5. Highly recommended.
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