The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Winter's Edge by Valerie Miner
Lisa Logan

Valerie Miner. Winter’s Edge. Afterword by Donna Perry. Feminist Press, 1997. 203 pp. Paper: $10.95.

With its new edition of Winter’s Edge (1984), Feminist Press makes widely available an early and difficult to find novel by Valerie Miner, a writer now well known for her concern with working class women’s issues. Set in 1979 and written in the early eighties, her book is still—perhaps even more—relevant.
The novel unfolds around a black woman activist’s fight against a moneyed redeveloper for the supervisor position of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Against this heated political backdrop and a cast of cops, prostitutes, shop owners, gays, straights, Italians, Asians, and Latin Americans, Miner’s vibrant heroines, two single seventyish white women, explore their relationship to their community and one another. Chrissie MacInnes is a militant, outspoken waitress who faces threats of violence while working exhaustively for Marissa Washington’s election. For the past twenty years, her best friend has been Margaret Sawyer, a shy, “well-behaved,” traditionally feminine, long-divorced newstand clerk. While Chrissie places her energy and emotional commitments in political causes, Margaret has difficulty taking stands on “abstract issues,” as she understands politics, and instead focuses on “mothering” the people around her. When the election grows ugly and violence becomes a reality, however, both women are forced to rethink their definitions of politics, community, and, finally, their love for each other.
As Donna Perry writes in her informative afterword, Margaret and Chrissie discover the “meaning of their lives at home” amid the “social and political unrest and violence.” Can we, Miner seems to ask, look around us and not do the same? [Lisa Logan]