Displaying 1 of 1 1978 Format: Book Author: Martin, Valerie, 1948- Title: Set in motion / Valerie Martin. Edition: First edition. Publisher, Date: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978. Description: 209 pages ; 22 cm Notes: 307870 ; *307871 LCCN: 78003822 ISBN: 0374261407 Other Number: 3729895 System Availability: 2 # System items in: 2 # Local items: 2 # Local items in: 2 Current Holds: 0 Place Request Add to My List Expand All | Collapse All Availability Trade Reviews Kirkus ReviewSocial worker Helene, possessed by a hovering, mindless dread and disquiet, has always known that her habit of indecision and drift gives her power over certain men. There is Michael, who initiates a fevered affair with Helene while planning to marry her friend--a cruelty which eventually blanches out into a disposable, disagreeable compulsion. Reed is a drug addict casually tempting death, who offers comfort and lethe. But it is Richard, married to Helene's best friend, who focuses in--through the lens of his own terror--on Helene's own pervasive, floating fears. Richard follows her, arranges bizarre meetings and declares in his journal (discovered after his attempted immolation) that Helene is a fellow victim whose weakness is power: ""She is afraid of everything but me. . . . For those of us in fear it's important to stay in motion. . . we don't waste time looking around speculating."" As Helene keeps pace with the disintegrating relationships with the three men, she also comforts Richard's wife and deals with a parade of clients--hostile, wretched, courageous--applying for food stamps. And through it all, she remains intact in her ""world of suicides,"" blessing her sanity and retaining her right to walk out, to keep in motion. First-novelist Martin coolly and efficiently traces the waterbug skittering in and around contemporary psychic hurts; except for Richard's tedious scab-picking journal, she truly, acutely involves us with every pitch and toss of a lady straining to keep an even keel. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission. Summary The startling arrival of Valerie Martin's first novel brought rave reviews and sounded the themes that would inform such later major works as Mary Reilly, The Great Divorce, and Salvation: the fragility of the physical world, the gritty details of employment, and the possibilities, however slim, of transformation and liberty. Helene Thatcher, the young woman narrator of Set in Motion, works -- not at the academic post to which she once aspired, but in the welfare offices of the city of New Orleans, a world of bureaucratic forms, files, bad air-conditioning, and departmental regulations. The chaos and despair that rule the lives of the people Helene serves are mirrored in her own life on the trendier side of town. Her lovers are given to casual violence and drugs; a friend toys, seductively, with sanity. Detached, erotic, Helene is a young heroine who is coping, barely. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved. Librarian's View Syndetics Unbound Displaying 1 of 1
