Passion sprinkled with politics and deception

Melissa DICKENSON is the ignored third child (out of four) of Dick Dickenson, former governor of Pennsylvania and now an up-and-coming Republican senator, and his wife, Rosemary, a smart, manipulative woman whose foremost goal is to further her husband’s political career. Melissa, having spent her young life trying in vain to get her father’s attention and her mother’s approval with stellar grades and accomplishments, is now content -- as a freshman at Wesleyan -- to draw as little notice from her parents as possible while creating a life of her own, free from her family’s larger-than-life existence.

In “The Third Child,” Marge Piercy’s plot-driven novel of politics and family dynamics, Melissa feels burdened by her position (practically nonexistent, in her mind) in the family and bears the scars of numerous hurts and insults. When her father first ran for governor, the family was given a cocker spaniel by one of his backers, in an effort to improve the candidate’s image. The dog became Melissa’s by default. “Floppy had been hers to walk and care for and brush,” Piercy tells us, “until one day about two months after the election, Melissa had come home from school and Floppy was gone.”

Melissa’s role in the family is not unlike that of the dog’s. She is hauled out for photo opportunities, a prop to establish her father’s family-man image, and then told to keep quiet and stay in line so as not to disturb the Dickenson facade. In a creative-writing class at Wesleyan, she reads an essay she has written about her family: “Time was the rarest thing in our household. Not my time, of course.... I always had the feeling I was on the tail end of a very long list of tasks to be attended to, people to be dealt with, events to arrange.”

Blake Ackerman, a handsome young man in the class, takes an immediate interest in her after that reading. Dark-skinned and Jewish, he is everything her conservative parents would disapprove of.

It’s not coincidental that Blake becomes fascinated by Melissa. We learn that he’s the adopted son of Si and Nadine Ackerman, liberal criminal attorneys who have spent years fighting Dick Dickenson on cases involving capital punishment. Melissa and Blake enter into a steamy, sex-driven affair; so needy is Melissa for affection that she can’t see that Blake is obsessed with dismantling her father’s career.

As the relationship grows -- and Piercy does a good job convincing readers that Blake truly falls for Melissa, even as he uses her -- Blake fuels Melissa’s dissatisfaction with her family, hacking into a computer system to access Rosemary’s e-mails to other family members, for instance, thus showing Melissa more clearly how insignificant she is in her family. Blake urges her to help him uncover damaging information about her father and his political maneuvering, ostensibly to improve Melissa’s relations with the senator. “You could be his conscience,” Blake persuades her. “You could surprise him with your knowledge, and then you’d have a new and better relationship -- and you’d be able to influence him for good.”

Dark undertones are everywhere as the plot unfolds, letting readers know that there’s more to Blake’s layered motives than Melissa perceives. We discover, well into the couple’s escalating commitment to each other, an ominous fact: Blake’s biological father, Toussaint Parker, had been convicted of murdering a police officer and executed under Dickenson’s watch. Readers begin to grasp just how deep into this quagmire Melissa has stumbled, though she continues to cloak these details in the mantle of Blake’s love.

As in a melodrama of old, the reader may feel the urge to call out to the protagonist (“Stop! Get out while you can!”), but there’s no halting the lovers on their inexorable path to tragedy, and the warning would fall on deaf ears. There’s something satisfying about feeling smarter than the characters you’re reading about -- but something false too.

Piercy (“Three Women,” “Woman on the Edge of Time”) has long written about issues of gender and class struggle, and she sets this novel against a backdrop of establishment versus anti-establishment politics. Her characters are often one-dimensional, seldom breaking out of their confining roles, but the pull of the narrative is strong, keeping us wondering just how bad everything is going to get before the final curtain falls.

We are never sure about what part Blake’s love for Melissa plays in his actions. This piece of the puzzle is the only one missing, the only element keeping the novel from being too simplistic in its resolution. Still, the trek to get to the end, even when we know where the author is leading, is often absorbing.