[The 158-Pound Marriage] is impressively flashy in episode and style, deceptively arch, and pocked all over with little depth charges of drama that rumble up with an aching, rueful but often hilarious humor. Irving fingers a human foible like a wary teenager feeling for incipient pimples: gingerly, gently, hoping against hope, but secretly stung by that sinking vision of victorious acne….

Irving is an ambitious and clever writer who looks cunningly beyond the eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance to the morning-after implications. (p. 3)

S. K. Oberbeck, in Book World—The Washington Post (© 1974, The Washington Post), October 20, 1974.