[Once inside Marge Piercy's "Going Down Fast"] you find a lively, vital montage of the protest establishment, Chicago style. The title implies a downbeat motif: a callously conceived university housing project slamming into a poor neighborhood thickly seeded with the intelligentsia. But before the walls come tumbling down, Miss Piercy exhibits some life styles that offer a low enough silhouette to survive urban demolition….

Miss Piercy fills a rapidly shifting scene with well-defined characters, and attunes them to the swing of the wreckers' ball…. [She] gets beneath the skins of her dramatis personae, black and white. Some transient trappings notwithstanding, the motivation of Rowley and Anna is as durable as what moved Tristan and Isolde.

Martin Levin, in a review of "Going Down Fast," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1969 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), November 9, 1969, p. 70.