In "The New York Times", the critic John Leonard called McEwan "one of the few English writers of fiction who belong these days to a dark Europe; he is a Samuel Beckett with some genital organization", but said that Thomas Mann had already written the novel and that Mann's book was better. Leonard argued, "No reader will begin "The Comfort of Strangers" and fail to finish it; a black magician is at work. [...] And yet everything that is erotic is also sick. [...] this novel, by a writer of enormous talent, is definitely diseased."