["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...