The Trap

By Martha Duffy

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR

by JUDITH ROSSNER

284 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

This novel may be the literary sleeper of the summer. It is assaulting the bestseller lists and has been sold to the paperbacks for $300,000 and to the movies for $225,000. Mr. Goodbar richly deserves its success; it is a rare kind of book: both a compelling "page turner" and a superior roman `a clef.

Five years ago, a young kindergarten teacher was murdered in her apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Her death seemed to be another pitiful urban statistic: a woman butchered because she walked in on a robbery or resisted rape. But as it turned out, the teacher had been cruising singles bars nightly and taking rough trade home.

Rossner's fourth fine novel--and her first success--is based on this case. It begins with the murderer's confession, so there is no suspense. The first few pages contain most of the shocks: bludgeoning, stabbing, necrophilia. Then the author follows her heroine's past from girlhood to deathbed. Theresa Dunn grows up in an Irish, middle-class family in The Bronx. Her childhood is unremarkable except for a case of polio that leaves her with a very slight spinal curvature. An adored older brother dies in an Army training-camp accident; a beautiful sister starts trashing her life with a succession of white-collar cads.

As an education major at City College, Theresa finds such a fate unthinkable for herself. She is not nearly glamorous enough to get abortions abroad --or need them. But she soon falls in love with a professor who uses her as a part-time bedmate and exam grader.

Ms. Victim. Taught by nuns, Theresa can recognize an English sentence. What she cannot see is that her beloved Dr. Engle is a callous lout. He dispatches her upon graduation with a quote from the Bible: "For everything there is a season." Parsable, no doubt, but Theresa can never understand it--or what follows. The turn, turn, turn begins. She gets a job teaching first grade. She feels that she "couldn't survive another love." Before long, she is hitting the Mr. Good-bar singles bar, arriving alone but leaving with pickups.

There are, she realizes, two Theresas. "There was a Miss Dunn who taught a bunch of children who adored her, and there was someone named Terry who whored around in bars. But the only thing those two people had in common was the body they inhabited. If one died, the other would never miss her--although she herself, Theresa, the person who thought and felt but had no life, would miss them both." Miss Dunn is, in fact, the least convincing character in the book. Terry, the amateur hooker, is much more interesting and complex. Feminists have already taken her up as a victim in a male-oriented world. Who can trust a man after an interlude with Dr. Engle? Then, too, Theresa's reservations about men are confirmed by the ones she asks to her apartment.

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

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