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But the woman is no Little Ms. Victim. When she was being put together, the killer instinct was not overlooked. As it turns out, she loves Dr. Engle principally because she can voice to him "the sly, hostile, outrageous things that had cropped up in her mind for years." She tells a lover of her random leching with mean gusto. One can even have some sympathy for her killer. He strikes her first because he is exhausted, and she will not let him stay the night. He gave her a good time in bed, he points out. "Okay, just okay," she says. That is a Venus flytrap talking.
Ironically, whatever the author's intentions, Mr. Goodbar will be received as part of the burgeoning canon of women's writing. Yet its cold, selfabsorbed, constantly dissatisfied heroine is not unlike the "stereotypes" whom male novelists are accused of constructing. She is also a strong, vital creation—and a giant step forward in the long-term interests of sexual detente.
Judith Rossner wrote Mr. Goodbar for money—although she never hoped for as much as she eventually collected. Divorced with two children, she expected that a novel on the young teacher's murder might make $40,000 and enable her to quit secretarial jobs. But she was interested in singles and singles' bars anyway. If Rossner, 38, were the advice-giving type, she would tell people to stay out of them: "They are dark and anonymous, like night—a concealing atmosphere for neurotic people to meet in." She does not mean to imply that all singles are unstable. To her, the worst thing about singles is the word itself. Marriage sounds better, but it is no panacea either; it is really "a mass solution to aloneness, the most common way of denying reality."
She was inspired to write fiction by Grace Paley's short story collection The Little Disturbances of Man. Paley has never had a big popular success but is admired as a genuine "writer's writer." Says her admirer: "I felt that here was someone writing with my sensibility. I loved her combination of sex and humor." Rossner is currently working as much as twelve hours a day on a new novel. Its subject: two women who marry Siamese twins—a theme that should truly explore the paradoxes of singleness. Rossner is delighted to have recognition before her but even happier to have Mr. Goodbar behind her. Throughout her writing she was so haunted by her subject that she was afraid to work in the evening. It was not that she expected a madman to leap through the window of her Manhattan apartment. What she feared was Theresa's approaching death, from which she could not save her. "In the morning you get away from your demons," she says. "At night you head back to them."
Martha Duffy