Miss Rule shows talent in setting [the scene of The Desert of the Heart], with its neon nights and torpid days in the huge desert, but becomes painfully sententious in baring the tense and tawdry dramas of her sexual misfits. [The protagonists'] predicament is made real and even moving, but too much of what they think and say reads like a pastiche of the sentimental idealism one might expect from a romantic novelette about the first stirring of a more conventional kind of love.