Books: Wallflower at the Orgy

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As Rachel shuttles between Washington and Manhattan, she oscillates between hysteria and impartial reportage. But if she is contradictory as a character, she is consistent as an alter ego. Nora Ephron once imagined herself as a "wallflower at the orgy, . .. everyone else is having a marvelous time, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes on it all." It was a premonitory passage. Here she is in 1983, everybody sleeping around like characters in a Restoration play, while she records the events with misery and wit. At times her comedy seems borrowed; the paradoxes are straight out of Peter De Vries: "All summer long I was snapping at him because he was never there." And the ethnic comedy ("The Jewish prince doesn't mean 'Where's the butter?' He means 'Get me the butter'") might have come from a property settlement with her first husband. But when Ephron is herself, she can be the most painfully funny two-time loser in America. For months, people will be debating whether Rachel's analyst Vera Maxwell is based on Nora's therapist Mildred Newman (How to Be Your Own Best Friend), or if Pollster Pat Caddell's white and black beard has been transferred to the chin of Carl Bernstein. That is the stuff of columns, not criticism. Long after the chatter has abated, Heartburn will be providing insights and laughter. Forty thousand copies are already in print, and the bestseller list cannot be far away. As Nora Ephron is about to learn, leaving well is the best revenge.

—By Stefan Kanfer