SOURCE: “Lost in Bridgeport,” in Washington Post Book World, November 22, 1992, p. 6.

In the following review, Perrin offers a negative assessment of Natural History, calling the novel “almost unreadable.”

In 1965, Maureen Howard published a stunningly good novel called Bridgeport Bus. It's about a 35-year-old virgin named Mary Agnes Keeley. She lives in Bridgeport, Conn., with her suffocating Irish mother (her fireman father is dead) and works as secretary to the president of a zipper company. Then she breaks loose and goes to New York. She finds men, adventures, a somewhat better job; she writes one part of the book herself in a surrealistic mode.

Thirteen years later, Maureen Howard published an exceptionally well-written memoir called Facts of Life. The central character is another M. K., only this time it is Howard herself. Maiden name: Maureen Kearns. The book tells of her childhood in an Irish section of Bridgeport, Conn...