Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Judith Rossner’s best-known novel, is a roman à clef about a young, convent-schooled, lower middle-class but respectable, Irish Catholic woman from the Bronx, New York City. Her body and psyche are scarred by a childhood, polio-induced curvature of the spine, which has been physically corrected by surgery. The twenty-eight-year-old woman has also suffered from an ugly-duckling complex as a result of having a supposedly more glamorous older sister. Theresa Dunn has little empathy, however, for a younger sibling, a conventional housewife who is perennially (and to Theresa, distastefully) pregnant.

Theresa’s lack of self-worth, despite a degree from the City College of New York and a job as a first-grade schoolteacher, takes her down a bleak and ultimately violent path. That road begins with her first affair with a married English professor in college. He is depicted as a self-serving creep who cynically exploits her before leaving her.

Her subsequent means of escape from her feelings of rejection and loneliness are casual affairs, interspersed at one point by a relationship with a Jesuit-trained Irish Catholic lawyer whose lovemaking she finds anesthetic. Theresa comes to dread “the quicksand of Irish Catholic life in the Bronx” when James Morrisey becomes serious about her.

Rossner’s story, based on the real New York murder case of Katherine Cleary by Joe Willie Simpson on New Year’s Day of 1973, reaches a denouement when Theresa, temporarily estranged from James, meets Gary Cooper White in one of the singles bars, Mr. Goodbar’s, that she regularly patronizes. This psychopathic drifter picks up Theresa, who needs little encouragement. Back in Theresa’s Upper West Side apartment, Gary is offended when, after sex, Theresa tells him to leave. He stabs her to death.

The heroine has two identities. One is Theresa, the clever, attractive, capable, and popular schoolteacher; the other is Terry, the maimed self-hater, addicted to sex, filled with fear and shame, who feels that being degraded by men using her body is becoming to her. This dismal tale is told in the context of the destructive and joyless hedonism of New York in the 1960’s and epitomized by the dialogue, which is studded with four-letter words. Rossner is ambivalent, however, about the extent to which blame should be placed on the sexually liberated schoolteacher or her brutal pickup. The author is more interested in portraying the particulars of a time and place and in raising questions than she is about providing answers.