This is Eve, the angry heroine of Robison's terrific new novel, "One D.O.A., One on the Way."

And I showed it to my friend [the producer and writer] David Milch and he said, "Boy, this is really something you could turn into a terrific novel."

I may well miss out on some terrific novels that happen to get interesting 2/5 of the way through, but I'm comfortable with that.

But I've read three terrific novels this year, all of them funny, all of them sad.

Still, "if Heller hadn't existed we might be calling this a pretty terrific novel" ( Kirkus Reviews ).

The New York Times review described the book as "a terrific political novel" as well as "sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible."

That might make a terrific novel some day.

This is a terrific novel, and you can't help thinking, from time to time, that in a better world David Long would be a famous writer.

Yet now, after reading her terrific new novel, "The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group," I may have to eat my word processor.

A few back, he produced a terrific novel, "Love Warps the Mind a Little," whose title hints at the verbal dexterity everywhere in evidence in "Johnny Too Bad."