SOURCE: “Maureen Howard: Satire and Sympathy,” in Washington Post Book World, May 11, 1986, p. 3.

In the following review, Yardley offers a positive assessment of Expensive Habits, commenting on the ways that the novel breaks from Howard's earlier work.

By contrast with Maureen Howard's four previous novels, Expensive Habits is long and, in the conventional sense, ambitious: the other books are delicate miniatures, elegantly crafted and somewhat elliptical in narrative method, but Expensive Habits attempts to paint a relatively large canvas and does so in a rather straightforward manner. The novel appears—the impression is fortified by the attendant publicity campaign—to be Howard's attempt to reach for a larger readership than she has thus far enjoyed; it is an honorable effort, and in no way does Howard compromise her exceptionally high standards in the process, but Expensive Habits is an odd book that is more likely to provoke curiosity...