Hating the Hate Machine
By John Skow
DANCE THE EAGLE TO SLEEP by Marge Piercy. 232 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.
Marge Piercy looks young and round and pretty and has a head full of flying bricks, and anyone who wants to learn what the revolution against the fat society is all about should read her novels. Those not beguiled by the revolution should read her novels anyway.
In Dance the Eagle to Sleep, her second novel, she follows the stress lines of U.S. society a few years into a bleak future. A very few years, because in the book's untroubled beginning it is not clear that anything has changed. The author introduces Shawn, an 18-year-old prep school senior who is a hugely successful rock singer: "In classes just enough juice flowed to light a few circuits; but when he was working with the group every switch turned on." Lucky Shawn. Recording profits turn into trust funds as he rides easy with the groupies and crows his amplified cock-a-doodle:
Well, girl, you put me down Cause you don't know who I am.
Behind these glasses and this nose Look out! Stand back! Hold on! It's
CAPTAIN WHAM!
I'm the shocking electric man.
Just let me at your socket.
Baby, I got the juice to turn you on.
Bucking the System. The author has more on her mind, however, than jollying readers with not-so-mock rock lyrics. A reference is made to a time when "the Army shelled Bedford-Stuyvesant . . . when the president has announced his policy of 'limited disciplinary retaliation' for uprisings." Shawn glooms about "the Nineteenth Year of Service" that hangs over his future. This scheme means 18 months in uniform for every 19-year-old, male and female. The Nineteenth Year was sold to the public as a liberal measure, because young pacifists were given a chance to serve in the pollution-control corps instead of the Army. But its real purpose is to choke off the youth revolution, and for two years it has done so.
When Shawn turns 19, he is attached to the Youth Services Bureau. He plays concerts, persuading other captive kids to groove on the state. Full of self-contempt, he deserts and is caught, then stockaded. He is now radicalized.
The revolution is reforming, despite the Nineteenth Year. Other combatants are introduced. Corey dreams of striding into school "cool and easy some morning with the rifle on his back like a guerrilla fighter. Line up the faculty. Torture the principal to learn where they keep the anxiety gases and the chemicals they put in the soup to make the kids stupid and passive." Corey sells pot, "for the money and the style and to buck the system." He is part Indian. He seizes his high school, holds it for four days, then escapes and forms a tribe of revolutionists who think of themselves as Indians. Their purpose is to recapture their country.
One of his recruits is Billy, a brilliant student who once volunteered to tutor a slow-reading black pupil named Joe. Gradually he comes to realize that he is merely coaching Joe up to the level where the Army can use him. Billy, who will be used himself -- he will serve the state as a scientist if he stays straight -- joins the Indians instead.
So does Joanna, a skinny 17-year-old running away from what she calls the "hate machine"-- middle-class society-- in hopes of finding a place "where people were gentle to each other, didn't bug each other, shared what they had, shared their food and their bodies and their music and their space and their kicks. She would not grab at anybody or let anybody fix hooks into her. Women mostly wanted to take some man, turn him into a house and go sit in it."
No Adults. The author, who promises to become the Kate Millett of fiction, attacks the hate machine by mirroring it in the disgust of the young. Adults are simply not considered. Parents are written off with a few contemptuous words: "His father was a pale gray drag . . . He watched television as if it were speaking to him." But through the hundred-page section in which she sets her characters in motion, there is absolutely no wavering in Marge Piercy's control. The portraits of the four revolutionists show the anatomy of their disaffection beyond the need for any further words. Whatever the reader's political persuasions, the novel's protagonists will stay for a long while in his mind. Dance the Eagle to Sleep bears a strong family resemblance, in kind and quality, to William Golding's Lord of the Flies and to Anthony Burgess' The Clockwork Orange. It would be no surprise to see it become, like these others, a totem and legend of the young.
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