What Mr Gold has succeeded in doing with considerable success [in Waiting for Cordelia] is to give a picture of modern San Francisco….

Mr Gold has an amusingly 'scummy' wit…. He also has a gift for creating pathetic and grotesque characters…. [One such character, a Russian agent,] eager always to be in the vanguard, sexually, socially or philologically, asks the narrator what word has now succeeded 'groovy'. Flash, fly, cool? the Russian suggests. The narrator tells him: neato. Mr Gold's novel is neato, as well as being flash, fly, cool and groovy. But it is like an organism without a backbone. The disparate elements show a hectic vigour; but there is nothing to hold them together, much less to coordinate their movements. (p. 21)

Francis King, "Neato," in The Spectator (© 1978 by The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The Spectator), Vol. 241, No. 7832, August 12, 1978, pp. 20-1.