detail is Mrs. Gould's major gift as a novelist, and goes far to compensate for makeshift plotting and relatively shallow characterization (none of the friends is really memorable on his own). The novel is obviously deeply autobiographical, and I wonder whether Mrs. Gould will be able to write a second one in which she is less personally involved, because her traumatic experience here has not been fully objectified into the serenely universal condition of art.

As it stands, though, Such Good Friends is a tour de force of journalistic narrative—fast-paced, and written in a no-nonsense style. Above all, a rueful, malign wit cuts through any potential self-pity in it like a shot of lemon juice in a bowl of borscht.

With commendable candor, Lois Gould has chosen Erica Jong's poem "Autobiography" as the epigraph of [Final Analysis]. ("The lover in these poems/is me … All this is true.") At its best, it is the slight but cleverly written and curiously moving story of a thirtyish woman journalist as she wars with herself and her masculine-dominated world in search of … well, a little dignity….

In [some] passages we see Gould's protagonist whole and entire, a very real and affecting figure in a landscape of ghastly familiarity, as she comes to grips with the invidious sexual programming that is every woman's lot and burden: to lie about her age and worry compulsively about her looks, to clean up frantically after men, to be humble before them, and—above all—not to compete with them, especially on their own terms. The yoke she bears is not of her own devising and yet, like some rebellious serf, she must carry it throughout her days and feel its weight upon her shoulders every hour she lives. And the loneliness of that burden is a terrible one.

All too soon, however, the book veers almost frantically in another less profitable direction, and before we know it, we are back in picture-puzzle land again. Try as we will to avert our eyes and suspend our curiousity, pull though we do for the author (wing it, girl! wing it!), there is no way to avoid the inevitable: all those real people keep trotting out, and to our dismay we find ourselves hotly engaged in the same old guessing game: Who is the magazine editor, really? Is the abominable novelist supposed to be Norman Mailer or Irving Wallace? And what names can we put to those faces in the crowd at the Hamptons? It is like some hideous bout of charades during a long weekend in the provinces, boring, inescapable, distracting, and enraging. We would give much to tear ourselves away from it, but some mysterious force holds us; and anyway, there is nothing else to do. Saddest of all, through it all there still flickers—at times faintly and at times with a tantalizing, warm, but impossibly distant glow—the light of a much finer and far more important book that simply is not getting written. There was so much to be said.

Now I could bite the bullet and read ["Final Analysis"] as an infatuated account of an obsessed woman's unrelieved self-loathing, an explicit study of masochism, with a rare candor that both excites and repels. Lois Gould is no novice at the examination of masochism. In "Such Good Friends," the author's first and fiercely interesting novel, there was another female victim, this one a betrayed wife who sits in the hospital waiting room, receiving merciless reports on her dying husband's concealed, complex erotic life. Here too, the woman had wept, neglected—and shoved to her side of the kingsized bed. One felt the wife's rage, her terror, all the unmanageable feelings stirring out of her numbed narcissism.

Yet Lois Gould has somehow refused these valuable feelings, and even suggests that, oh, well, he wasn't really so bad, and the wife laments after his death, "I miss something that must have been us. Because we were something, in spite of each other, weren't we?" What they were was married, and the women in Lois Gould's novels seem to share the conviction that with husbands they are something, without them they are nothing, orphans of the storm.

While creating the fluff of women's glamor magazines, Gould's freelance femme lives in a generally sustained manic giggle, which, when seasoned by drink, dexies, or the threat of personal happiness, turns into floods of tears. "Final Analysis," like a wet Kleenex, is a by-product of women's dependency problems….

One virtue of Gould's book is that it creates a feminine universe, in which the doctor's stick-figure existence is at least partial reply to centuries of male-oriented fiction. There are no direct exchanges about the content of their relationship because Dr. Foxx is such a foil, and the reality comes across simply through the totality with which the heroine is consumed by her problem.

Both characters lack curiosity about who and why they are, just as Gould lacks awareness that her consciousness as a writer is made possible by the struggles of women writers in the past….

There is, finally, little sense of [the heroine's] having learned from her struggle or problems; Lois Gould has penetrated the universe of women and come back with a box of chocolate-covered teardrops.

[Final Analysis is] a slick romance about a lonely, disaffected psychiatrist and his guilt-ridden, weepy ex-patient which is occasionally quite funny but pushes feminism and enlightenment-through-psychiatry in the same way that old-fashioned romances used to push love and moral rectitude. The characters here—the woman's friends in a consciousness-raising group, the piggy publishing men who treat her so badly, and even the sloppy, absentminded psychiatrist—never really jell, because they are more like peripheral exhibits in the woman's case history than believable people. The woman herself is sharp and clear. Like most Gould heroines, she's a rather endearing schlemiel who knows she deserves a better life than the one she is living, but even she is subjected to too much labeling and packaging (expressions like "I'm functioning" and "needing someone emotionally" appear with depressing frequency), and, throughout, the author's tart, irreverent sense of humor is undercut by the heavy-handed politicking.

The New Yorker, April 22, 1974, p. 154.

Miss Gould has assayed a satiric novel [Final Analysis] about an analyst, an analysand, and that portion of the literary world which is presided over by male magazine editors. It would be one of those novels that might be passed over without a word were it not for its inordinately irritating qualities, notable among them the archness and the sentimentality that lie at the core of it. It is a peculiarly unpleasant—one might be tempted to say unhealthy—form of sentimentality, coming as it does at the heels of Miss Gould's version of satire. Satire, one is given to understand from the execution of this novel, is that vision which proceeds from hatred and wretchedness; love is what proceeds from health and openness. Miss Gould perpetrates this simple, if unconscious, belief on a novel about which it ought to be said only that it has, at heart, the point of view of a daytime TV serial, with none of the saving brevity of that form, and that it can be counted on, page after page, to serve up with singular self-confidence most of the clichés of our time about analysis and male chauvinism and the politics of personal relationships.