["Birds of Passage"] almost works as comedy: Bernice Rubens is quite funny, for instance, in her description of the Walsh and Pickering ménages when she describes their sexual and social lives in terms of the ritual care and trimming of the hedge between the two households. She also offers some poignant insights into the heart: "It had been years since anyone had held her, and it frightened her," she says of Mrs. Dove as she is embraced by her daughter. "She thought she might erupt like a long-dormant volcano, and her lava would rage with longings."

But the novel's comic and serious dimensions do not complement each other. Nor does Bernice Rubens's subject matter coordinate well with the distance of her perspective. I am willing, reluctantly, to admit that there may be women, like Mrs. Pickering, who are so dedicated to self-denigration that they would find violation thrilling. I know that others, like Mrs. Walsh, can be bullied and blackmailed into going along with almost anything; and I can see that an apparently ordinary man with a wife and two children might be in the grips of a compulsion to rape the middle-aged passengers of a ship's cruise. But both the man's need and the women's response to it fall into the category of pathological behavior. It is the sort of thing that might do nicely either as outright farce or as a serious, psychological novel; but it is quite wrong for Bernice Rubens's brisk, ironic approach, which serves to belittle her characters. She does not seem to like them much, or even to find them very interesting; and in the end they look not only silly and small but also as though they had been manipulated by the author to serve her own frame of mind rather than their fictional necessities. Despite its many good moments, "Birds of Passage" leaves the reader unsatisfied. (p. 25)