'Heartburn' appears in England in a truncated form, and turns out to be nothing more surprising than 'Rhoda meets Henry Kissinger' (or, rather, she doesn't: he stays in the wings). Nicely written, funny in a sassy, downbeat, disabused way, about such well-known subjects as Jewish mothers, shrinks, group therapy, mugging, it shares the basic assumptions of such humour: everyone will recognise such things, everyone is basically the same. When you're single, Rachel Samstat tells us, 'you meet new men, you travel alone, you learn new tricks, you read Trollope, you try sushi, you buy nightgowns, you shave your legs.' Suppose you didn't do any of these things? You might become an individual, not a class-member, and that's where true novels used to begin.

Frank Tuohy, "Mediatized Offerings," in The Observer, August 7, 1983, p. 25.∗