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Looking for Mr. Goodbar, by Judith Rossner
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Based on a harrowing true story, the groundbreaking #1 New York Times bestseller, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, is a story of love, power, sex, and death during the sexual revolution of the 1970s.
Theresa Dunn spends her days as a schoolteacher whose rigid Catholic upbringing has taught her to find happiness by finding the right man. But at night, her resentment of those social mores and fear of attachment lead her into the alcohol-and-drug fueled underworld of singles’ bars, where she engages in a pattern of dangerous sexual activity that threatens her safety and, ultimately, her life.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar is “uncommonly well-written and well-constructed fiction, easily accessible, but full of insight and intelligence and illumination” (The New York Times Book Review). With more than four million copies in print, this seminal novel—a lightning rod for controversy upon its publication—has become a cultural touchstone that has forever influenced our perception of social rebellion and sexual empowerment.
- Sales Rank: #214367 in Books
- Brand: Rossner, Judith
- Published on: 2014-07-08
- Released on: 2014-07-08
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.37" h x .80" w x 5.50" l, .57 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
About the Author
Judith Rossner [1935–2005] was an American novelist, most famous for the bestseller, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1975). A lifelong New Yorker, her books centered around the themes of urban alienation and gender relations.
Most helpful customer reviews
68 of 73 people found the following review helpful.
The two faces of Theresa
By A Customer
This was a disturbing book in many ways--not because of the subjectmatter or the storytelling, but because it reaches out to anyone who reads it, forcing them to confront their darker, hidden sides. As the story begins, Theresa Dunn is a 10-year-old child who comes from a large Irish Catholic family and frequently gets overlooked. The degree to which her parents pay her little attention while lavishing affection on her older sister, Katherine, is shocking, because Theresa's spine curvature could have been corrected immediately had they noticed. This, of course, adds to Theresa's self-loathing and her feeling that she is insignificant. The operation is a success, but Theresa is not quite the same. Katherine gets emotional and tells Theresa that she looked like she "came back from the dead". Theresa also has a slight limp to show for it, a constant reminder of her unimportance. From this point on, anyone who makes a reference to Theresa's limp, however casual, is basically striking Theresa in her most vulnerable place. Her failure to come to terms with her self-loathing eventually will lead to far more trouble in the future.
Theresa is still very much the good Catholic girl, however, and she still loves children. Her decision to become an elementary school teacher allows her to temporarily step into the role of "Mother" (nurturer) and "Father" (educator), to be simultaneously the parents she wished she had. It is during her college years that she meets Martin Engle, a sardonic English professor who will have a profound effect on her already shaky self-image. Martin is married, but he is still very much adored by his female students, and he does nothing to overtly discourage them. Theresa soon finds herself the object of Martin's affection, although he teases her for having such a "serious Catholic girl" personality. Rossner includes a number of vivid images in this section; for instance, Theresa, about to be seduced by Martin, watches coffee dripping from the coffee-maker, looking like brown mud. Their affair lasts for four years, until one day when Martin casually shrugs her off. She is simply another fling to him; he openly informs her that he will probably have another one by this summer. Theresa goes into a deep depression and again, comes out of it permanently altered. Now she is "soiled goods" in every sense of the word, and as her casual alter ego "Terry", she begins to behave recklessly, seducing strangers and bringing them to her apartment at night. During school hours with the children, however, she is still very much "Theresa", the "good" Catholic girl who lavishes affection on her students.
The "Mr. Goodbar" of the title is simply the name of one of Terry's haunts. Her double life is two such extreme opposites, that on the rare occasions when one element appears in another, it often leads to disaster. For instance, she meets a "nice" gentleman, James, who turns her off sexually, but who is comforting because of his unconditional love for her. This, of course, is beyond Theresa's comprehension, and in her perverse way, she often strives to push him away by acting "hard", swearing too much and being sardonic in much the same way as Martin. It is during one of these phases that Theresa attends a wedding in a "slutty" black dress that "Terry" would wear. At the sight of James' mother, Theresa is suddenly filled with shame, to the point where she feels physically ill. Likewise, with her "regulars", she is careful not to let them intrude into her "other life"; after sex, she immediately demands that they leave.
The most painful aspect of reading the book is the loneliness Theresa experiences. She has no close friends, her parents are remote and distant, and her older sister is flighty and cannot be depended on. Theresa's life is a dark abyss that she gradually sinks into, and she is a tortured, conflicted woman to the end. This can be a very depressing story, in spite of the vivid sexual imagery. Living in Theresa's skin is like going to a wild party every night, only to wake up with a horrendous hangover the next morning. The late 60's sensibilities are very much in evidence here, also; none of the so-called "peace and love" generation are any more successful at intimacy and committment than Theresa. James is a symbol of a more noble, idealistic time, when "old-fashioned" values like honesty and chivalry were treasured. Theresa herself is symbolic of people's best and worst selves; the tragedy is that the worst will often win out.
31 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
Still holds up thirty years later.
By Robert Beveridge
Judith Rossner, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Washington Square Press, 1975)
Looking for Mr. Goodbar was an unconscionably shocking novel when it appeared in 1975. It was still shocking when Richard Brooks turned it into a devastating film featuring rising stars Richard Gere, Tom Berenger, and William Atherton as the three most important men in Diane Keaton's life. Now, here we are thirty years later. The scene Rossner set isn't shocking. But in some ways, her treatment of it is, and this is why Looking for Mr. Goodbar is still in print, three decades after its original release.
Theresa Dunn, we learn on the first page, is dead. She was killed by a guy she picked up in a bar a few hours beforehand (leading to Rex Reed's famous, and utterly inaccurate, statement "this is the story of what happens to Theresa in bars."). We go from police report to said guy's statement, which is equal parts amusing and chilling. Then the rest of the novel's three hundred ninety pages gives us Theresa's story as it leads up to her murder.
Despite Reed's tantalizing review, Theresa Dunn is not the kind of barhopper one might find in a bad seventies softcore movie. In fact, she spends not much time at all in bars themselves. (Mr. Goodbar, the name of the bar where she picks up the guy who kills her, is only mentioned by name twice in Theresa's portion of the story, if I recall correctly.) The novel actually focuses on Theresa's relationships, and how they contribute to the novel's outcome-- first with one of her college professors, and then conflicting, simultaneous relationships with two men, the macho and aggressive Tony and calm, staid James, as Theresa tries to figure out who she really is and what she wants from life.
Rossner approaches her subject matter in a frank, matter-of-fact tone. Thirty years on, it's not the sex that's shocking, nor the idea of having it casually; we've seen it all a thousand times before. It's small offhand comments about tangential topics, or terminology (none of which, of course, is capable of being used in an Amazon review), that are still a shock to the system. Reading it, you realize that not all of the boundaries we pushed in books in the seventies were eventually broken; some of them rebounded.
But all that aside, what's it like as a book? Well, it's readable, and a relatively quick novel; Rossner does know how to keep the pages turning. I'm not sure whether she had literary aspirations with this novel (and, to be honest, I'm not sure whether she achieved them, though being re-released by Washington Square Press in 1995 certainly lends the novel an air of credibility in that regard), but it's certainly two or three rungs above your garden-variety genre potboiler or Beeline novel. Rossner's characters are deep, rich constructions, even when they border on the stereotypical (Theresa's sister Katherine and her husband are clinging-to-the-sixties free love poster children, better for a laugh these days than anything else), and the situations in which they find themselves are grimly realistic. Rossner wrote herself a fine novel, and one that deserves to be rediscovered by a new generation. *** �
25 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Caution on the road to love
By Christopher M. MacNeil
Judith Rossner's warning in her novel to take a flashlight when we visit the darkest corners of sexual experimentation is forever relevant. "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" (the title not a character but a pick-up bar) gives us a Catholic teacher of deaf children who, after dark, takes on a truly dark character and sets out on the bar scene looking for sex and, maybe if she's lucky, love. But the search for both is strewn with broken hearts, disappointments and dangers, as Theresa finds out too late. Rossner's main character comes across as a basically desperate human scarred by years of indifferent parents, a sister who was preferred in childhood over her and a low self-image caused by a curved spine (although later corrected by surgery). In seeking approval, validation, redemption and love, Theresa ventures forth into the darkness and risks of anonymous sex and, of course, not finding in the darkness what she seeks. The accomplishment of "Goodbar" is Rossner's uncanny ability to focus on and then bare the desperation that fuels any person's search for love or whatever it's called. All too often, the searchers who wander too far into the blackness meet the same final fate that Theresa does, and Rossner's descriptive talents of that fate spare no one. Hers is a cautionary tale that, if we must, don't go too far into the night without a light on in the brain. Without it, we may never get a second chance. The book was later turned into a theatrical film with Diane Keaton turning in a tremendous performance. Both the film and book warrant attention and respect of the dangers of the night.
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