["My Darling, My Hamburger"] seems to me to be a better novel than "The Pigman."… It's the story of two couples in their senior year at high school. One pair, Maggie and Dennis, are squareish, not too attractive, unsure of themselves and each other. The other pair, Liz and Sean, are desperately in love, and the boy is importunate. And he gets his way. (The girl's resistance is ended, convincingly, not by persuasion or passion but because her stepfather is nasty to her.) And Liz becomes pregnant. Sean says he'll marry her but is dissuaded by his worldly-wise father. She has an abortion. Maggie is with her, thinks it has gone wrong and gives the game away to Liz's parents.

And that's it. The book ends with the graduation-day scene, from Maggie's viewpoint. Liz is conspicuously absent. Nothing much has happened to Maggie, and her friendship with Dennis has fizzled out, but here she is, a year older, a year wiser, ready for what comes next.

It's a simple enough story. It proves for the millionth time that you can get along quite well without a brilliant plot. The book is concerned single-mindedly with sex and growing up; more precisely, it's about the predicament—funny, bitter and nerve-racking—of men and women who are also children….

True, the story is value-laden; but then, the subject is value-laden. It's made plain, without being pointed out in so many words, that the girl still pays and that abortion is what it is, not just a fashionable talking-point. The writing is professional in the extreme. Some of the important action takes place off-stage—for instance, Liz's telling the boy of her pregnancy and her parents' discovery of what's happened. We don't need these scenes; they're standard; we can picture them well enough. But it's not so obviously sound to skip (between parts one and two) from Liz's capitulation to the news, months later, that she's pregnant…. This is too near the heart of the story to be skipped; this is where the author's quick leap is an evasion, and he misses the chance to supersede at last the row of asterisks or the strictly-clinical account or the romantic euphemisms. We could have done to see these two as lovers. (Happy lovers? Perhaps.)

The facsimiles of letters and announcements and whatnot that decorate the text strike me as gimmickry, and here and there, especially at the end of the book, there's a patch of sogginess where we want it to be crisp. As a work of literary art this is more a promise than an achievement, but it's quite a big promise and it's not a negligible achievement. (p. 2)