Rita Mae Brown is as subversive as apple pie. Her favorite author, according to the flyleaf of Six of One, is Mark Twain. It doesn't surprise me a bit. Imagine, if you will, Tom Sawyer, only smarter; Huckleberry Finn, only foulmouthed, female, and lesbian, and you have an idea of Molly Bolt, heroine of Rubyfruit Jungle. This largely autobiographical first novel … [features] an exuberantly raunchy style and the toughest heroine this side of Mae West. The book was funny, explosive, shocking ...

[Six of One] is in large part dialogue, and Brown, like many of her colleagues, favors rapid-fire witticism. Unfortunately she uses blanks, as for instance: "Your glasses got so many rhinestones on them, when the sun hits you, people are blinded by the light." The wise-cracks are fast enough, but no sooner sent off than they stop, drop, fizzle and fade into the next spurious remark, leaving the reader only bewildered, and after a very few pages annoyed. Clearly [Brown is] a devotee of the Mari...

Rita Mae Brown's [In Her Day] disappointed me, despite my pleasure in reading of places I know and struggles I have lived—as well as in reading a story in which lesbianism, while an important part of the characters' lives, is a given, and not itself the central conflict…. My disappointment has two sources—one, a desire, simply, for more of the novelist's skill: greater differentiation between one character's voice and another's; more scenic embodiment ...

Told in a series of flashbacks and flashforwards (to 1980), Six of One is the story of two sisters who have been fighting like hellcats since early childhood in 1909. It is also the story of a group of rich, indolent women in a small American town meeting regularly over the years to play bridge in the house of the lesbian and very beautiful Celeste Chalfonte. No one is particularly likeable and—greatly weakening the novel's credibility—none of the characters develops one iota from the m...