SOURCE: “Ordinary Anguish,” in Times Literary Supplement, October 17, 1986, p. 1168.

In the following review, Goodwin offers a positive assessment of Loving Roger.

[In Loving Roger] Anna is a typist at TT, remarkable only for her ordinariness. She lives with her parents, who remain deep in mourning for her brother, Brian, killed in a car crash years ago. Anna's feelings are important to no one but herself. She remains cramped into a tiny box room, Brian's spacious bedroom next door maintained by her parents as a shrine. Her boyfriend, Malcolm, whom she has been seeing since the third year at school, digs up worms from her parents’ garden to use for fish bait; and constantly but unenthusiastically suggests that they should marry.

In the midst of this mediocrity and boredom, Roger Cruikshank arrives to work as a typesetting executive at T. T. Tall, blond, middle-class and egotistical, he seems to...