”To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” Ecclesiastes 3:1 Professor Martin Engle broke off his four year affair with his student Theresa Dunn by quoting Ecclesiastes to her. Like a lion circling a herd of gazelles probing for the weakest member he had decided she was the right one to sustain his ego. She was just coming out of her ugly duckling stage and emerging from the shadows cast by the wings of her swan like sister. She is self conscious of her body. A polio incident as a child left her with a slight sway which men will later think is sexy. She has a scar running down her back from a surgery to repair damage done to her spine by the disease. She had to be in the hospital for over a year strapped into a series of casts and back braces to insure she could continue to walk. She was tailor made for Martin Engle. When he hires her as his “writing assistant” the only writing was the scribbling on the wall. He notices the slight bobble in her walk and asks her about it which exposures all her insecurities wiping away in a matter of seconds her new vision of herself. ”I’m not attempting to seduce you.” he said. “I am attempting to comfort you because I see that I’ve hurt you.”An excuse to touch her more like it. She gave him a reply that must have made his heart sing knowing that he’d sunk his teeth into his prey. ”But I’d rather be seduced then comforted.”Another kink to their “relationship” is that his work space is next to the office where his wife works as a pediatrician. When they make love have sex it is on a daybed right against the wall separating the two rooms. The recklessness of potentially being caught had to heighten his enjoyment. The fact that Theresa would rather be seduced than comforted also shows her need to be normal. Being seen as a sexual being gets her further away from the image of that little girl in the hospital bed. Martin was an adult that didn’t have to be a parent. It is all part of the seduction package that makes him more charming to these young girls. ”One of the reasons she loved him was that she’d understood since she first heard him talk that all those sly or hostile or outrageous thoughts that had cropped up in her mind for years and remained unsaid because they would shock or upset or alienate the people she knew would be perfectly alright with him.”Martin’s charm does have more than a few cracks in the veneer.”Theresa has asked him after sex why he was angry with her, he’d said he always disliked women after fucking them. She’d blanched because she had never thought of what they did as just fucking.”To a mature self-confident woman a statement like that would have insured Martin an ass kicking to the curb, but then Martin doesn’t like women capable of doing that. He likes girls. He is truly a monster. A man, a succubus, who steals away their innocence and then trades them for another hatchling. They each have a season it seems. The reason I’ve spent so much of this review writing about Theresa’s first relationship is that I believe this is THE turning moment in her life. The cavalier way that Martin has sex with her advances her well beyond her years. As part of the seduction he made her feel special and encouraged her to be a writer, but then in an act of betrayal that dismisses his kind words he showed her that he valued her most for the pleasure she could give him. The very pleasure that he could then hate her for because, after all, it isn’t his fault that he is this way. Martin Engle did not bash her with the lamp that ended her life, but the lingering results of his actions did put her in that bed with that stranger. This book is loosely based on the actual case of Roseann Quinn, a Catholic school teacher who picked up men in New York bars. Unfortunately this reckless behavior resulted in her murder on New Year’s day in 1973. The seemingly nice girl in the wrong place meeting a nightmare. When Theresa starts picking up men in bars she sometimes reveals to them that she is a school teacher. This is shocking to the men. They didn’t expect to meet a school teacher in a bar and certainly didn’t expect to meet one that wanted to have sex with them. Diane Keaton plays Theresa Dunn in the movie based on the book.Theresa starts to panic when she meets James Morrisey. James isn’t interested in taking advantage of her sexually. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t find her attractive. Things would be simpler for Theresa if he was the kind of guy who wanted a quick tumble in the hay. He is a romantic. He is successful. He screams mortgage, six kids, and a white picket fence. (These are bad things another leftover twist from her time with Martin.) She treats James like crap as if she is trying to save herself from the responsibilities and expectations that being involved with a guy like James entails. ”Aha Theresa, “ He said. “You’re so cruel to me. Why?” Because you like me too much, was what came into her head. But of course that was ridiculous. It wasn’t that simple.Yes it is. The rose tinted glasses rest lightly on James’s face. He has spun a vision of Theresa out of fine gold and white lace that she does not want to be. How stupid can he be to love a woman like her? Unfortunately she can’t even like herself enough to allow someone to love her. Theresa’s final pick-up at the Mr. Goodbar is, in my mind, a last desperate attempt to escape the encircling sensibility of a life with James. It works. This book is famous for it’s sex scenes. They are so deftly woven into the plot that the sensationalism of them is somewhat offset by the psychological elements that Judith Rossner explores in the process. This book has been called a feminist book which I wonder if that would even be a part of the discussion if Judith Rossner had been Jeffrey Rossner? There are breadcrumbs…”Why is it,” she asked, “that if you ask a woman how she is, the first thing she tells you is about her husband or boyfriend?”...but I never found the loaf. The book was too commercially successful to ever be looked on as literature, but if Rossner was still alive and giving a lecture on writing I’d be there...with bells on...a fresh notebook before me, and a finely honed pencil in my hand.
"Talking was so much more complicated than making love...fucking, she should call it, since it was hard to see how anything she did with him could be about love. To talk with people you had to ignore the way you felt and speak from the front of your face...or else go through the effort of distilling those feelings into something that made some kind of sense, was acceptable in some way. That was what words did, really, make some kind of order out of the dark jumble of feelings and perceptions and nightmares inside you. And there was no way to do that in this situation. No way to explain in an orderly fashion how, without being drunk, stoned or out of her mind, she was having the most incredible sexual pleasure of her life with someone who at best amused her, and at worst frightened her half to death."(page 167, "Looking for Mr. Goodbar")-------To say this is a cautionary tale about the seedy side of the singles bar scene in the '60s-'70s would be simplistic, on several levels. It's certainly not a book just about a seemingly "nice" schoolteacher by day who's a coldhearted one-night-stand fuck by night. It attempts to be the story of a life, and in that it's limited. I think I might have liked a few pages here and there about her working in her classroom with her kids, just to fill things out a little and lend balance. I think the famously disturbing Richard Brooks 1977 movie adaptation starring Diane Keaton attempted this, and in true Hollywood fashion turned the contrast into a bludgeon by making her a teacher of special ed students. At least they didn't outfit her in a nun's habit.[Addendum: I have to make an insertion here after the fact. In truth, Brooks did appropriate, it seems, from this novel and from the actual case on which it was based. The real-life teacher DID work with special-ed kids. A book detailing the true case: "Closing Time: The True Story of the 'Goodbar' Murder" elaborates this. I plan to read this soon.)------some preliminary thoughts:The book is ambivalent about the emergence of the free-sex era. Rossner clearly realizes and indicates that the era of repression was wrong and unnatural and yet one is disturbed by the bleakness of the noncommittal bed-hopping lifestyle as presented. The complicated portrait of her protagonist, Theresa, makes these feelings even more unsettling and harder to pinpoint. That things aren't clear-cut is to its credit. There's a lot to think about in this book. I'm enjoying the hell out of this. I'm giving it four stars for being a great read and an extra star for NOT being on all those lists of literary classics you SHOULD read. I'm learning to take those with a grain of salt; this has more feeling and reality and gravitas than shit like "One Hundred Years of Solitude."FINAL THOUGHTS:I kept finding choice passages I wanted to mark and highlight here, and so many thoughts - often conflicting - racing through my mind as I read this, but it was such a compelling read I didn't want to put it down and cut the flow. So, interestingly, I found myself playing mental ping pong about Theresa and about James. I hated the way she treated him, but then his sickeningly goody two-shoes manner and acceptance of her abuse made me pissed at him. I was feeling almost like her. In this way, I think Rossner gives her protagonist a bit of an out. That, and all the issues of deprivation as a child. I sometimes wonder if it's possible for a character to be "bad" just because she/he is, and not because of childhood traumas. But, in any case, Rossner did a fine job of crafting a believable character study. By the end, as I read this on the bus, I got chills throughout my body and had to wipe away tears. I know people saw me. Geez, I felt a little like wimpy James. This was a great read, an underrated, maligned book.
Do You like book Looking For Mr. Goodbar (1997)?
This is one of those oddities where the killer was vastly more interesting than the victim. The first chapter is focused on Gary as he confesses his crime and relates his messed up life. The book already had potential. But then we leave Gary behind and must chart the course of Theresa Dunn's emotionally unbalanced life. I kept wishing we could get back to Gary. As another reviewer here aptly put it, Theresa is a hot mess. She's also a tad bit dull. I'm not saying I hate Terry, but I got tired of her very quickly. Come to think of it, I got tired of just about every character in this story. Except Gary. This was a best seller back in its day and I'm trying to figure out why. Was it because it was based upon a true life murder case? Was it because of the depictions of mild drug abuse and even milder casual sex? (I found it oddly comical that of all the men Theresa had picked up to have sex with, the only one to ever freak her out was the guy who wanted to be responsible and wear a condom.)I wasn't entertained.
—L. (I've Stopped Counting)
I don't know what to think about this one, if I'm being honest. I didn't dislike it, I found it interesting - only I have extremely mixed emotions when it comes to Theresa Dunn, ranging from empathy to anger and back again. To keep myself from going insane and thinking the book to death, I think the important question to ask, after reading this, is not WHY Theresa becomes/is the way she is - because I have as hard of time sympathizing with her as I do resenting her - but rather just to accept that she is just a very disturbed and lost girl, whether you can understand her vantage point or not - the why bit is the least important bit of them all. I wish things were different for her, but the story warns you as it opens of her ultimate fate. I found myself wondering about those she left behind after I finished the book - how would they take the news of her incredibly violent murder? How would that fit in with their own perceptions of the girl they knew? I feel the sorriest for James. Side notes - I believe this was written in the 70s, but I think it has aged with extraordinary grace. It also has a very The Bell Jar vibe to it.
—Ashley Scott
A good solid book about the potential consequences of promiscuity before the age of AIDS.People who live in this generation might not understand or appreciate this book. After all, we are living in a world without boundaries where sexting happens with people you've never met as easily as it does with someone you know, married people are fair game in the dating arena, and senior citizens are the fastest growing population to contract HIV. Does anyone know of a book that speaks to this generation about the relational consequences between men and women?
—Angela
