[In the following review, Sellers finds only "modest" literary merit in Waiting to Exhale, but notes its appeal among "glitzy, commercial women's novels."]

Terry McMillan's novel, Waiting to Exhale, raced up the New York Times bestseller lists immediately after its publication in the United States early last summer, and has lingered near the top for twenty-three weeks. There are already more than 700,000 copies in print. Paperback rights for the book startled the recession-conscious publishing industry by selling for $2.64 million, and McMillan's drop dead stare and Nefertiti hair-style have become familiar features on daytime television talk shows and in glossy magazines across America.

Most black women writers are associated with a recognizable tradition of serious, ideologically inspired black literature, written primarily for "concerned" whites and black intellectuals. McMillan, however, has little truck with ideology of any kind. She writes to entertain, by providing the type of sexy, popular novel that has been making Jilly Cooper and Danielle Steele rich for years.

Written for and about educated black women, Waiting to Exhale reflects the growing numbers of successful African-Americans who have fled the drugs and violence of the ghettoes for fashionable neighbourhoods, while trying to preserve a uniquely black cultural heritage. McMillan's characters believe in black solidarity. To act like a white is an act of betrayal. "White folks" hover disconcertingly on the novel's margins.

Waiting to Exhale's four protagonists live in Phoenix, Arizona. Apart from being black, female and thirtysomething, they have one thing in common: "None of us have a man." And they're holding their breath until they get one. Savannah wants to feel "important to somebody," though she's not yet desperate: she's just "thirsty," not "dehydrated." Bernadine has been betrayed by her acquisitive husband, who traded her in for a new trophy-wife, his twenty-four-year-old (blonde) book-keeper. Gloria has given up waiting for a man who can make her toes curl and takes comfort in God, her hair salon, a promiscuous adolescent son and much too much food. Robin's toes curl for "pretty men with big dicks," but she's hung up on an unscrupulous cad and doesn't know a good man when she sleeps with one. Waiting to Exhale chronicles these women's bedroom capers in their exhaustive—and exhausting—searches for Mr Right.

He's hard to come by. Black men prove to be "'Stupid.' 'In prison.' 'Unemployed.' 'Crack-heads.' 'Short.' 'Liars.' 'Unreliable.'" And worse. McMillan's generalized male-bashing has understandably alienated some black men. Her portrayal of women may be more sympathetic, but it is equally shallow. Her characters' preoccupation with deodorants, douches and dates soon grows wearisome. And the attention McMillan draws to male-female rifts within the African-American community seems at odds with the black solidarity she otherwise implicitly approves.

But whether her views are politically correct or not, McMillan has bit a nerve. Many African-American women identify with her heroines. Using the vibrant street-talk McMillan grew up speaking, her protagonists tackle sexual issues that most women can relate to.

It may in part be concern to avoid accusations of racism that has prevented some critics putting this book firmly where it belongs—among the glitzy, commercial women's novels. Its one true importance is that it appeals to a market that American publishers have previously overlooked—the new black middle class. But its literary merits are modest.