L ooking for Mr. Goodbar is a novel of its times. It was based on an actual event, the 1973 murder of a school teacher named Roseann Quinn by a man she met in a Manhattan singles bar and took back to her apartment. On one level it deals with the modern singles lifestyle and its dangers, a focus picked up by a reviewer in Ms. who called the book "a haunting, compelling thriller, guaranteed to make any woman terrified of the next strange man she meets."

Its relevance is far broader than that, however. When Rossner says the book "struck a nerve," she is referring to its concern with the sexual revolution, the women's movement, the widespread lack of self-esteem, and the difficulties in today's society of getting to know others, resulting in overwhelming loneliness.

Feminists took up the heroine as a victim in the male-oriented...