Looking for Mr. Goodbar, according to Carol Eisen Rinzler in the New York Times Book Review, might be placed in a number of literary genres. It might be considered a modern passion play, or perhaps a feminist treatise, with Theresa a political victim of rape. Theresa Dunn, according to Rinzler, "takes her place beside Henry James's Isabel Archer and Scott Fitzgerald's Nicole Diver as another victim of the American Dream, a woman who never roused herself enough to wake up from the nightmare."

Among modern writers, Rossner is most often compared with Joyce Carol Oates. In Looking for Mr. Goodbar, according to Roger Sale, "Rossner is good the way Oates can be, and is more efficient too, so that without resorting to a pressurized cabin atmosphere she can locate the tangles of her heroine's Bronx family and the gradual wastedness of her obvious intelligence."