SOURCE: "Escaping Relations," in The New Leader, Vol. LXI, No. 16, July 31, 1978, pp. 15-17.

Merkin is an American novelist, critic, short story writer, and editor. In the following excerpt, she offers praise for Set in Motion, relating the novel's thematic focus on love and emotional "disengagement."

As the title of her powerful and unsettling first novel, Set in Motion, suggests, Valerie Martin writes about our contemporary romance with mobility, the freedom to get up and go—generally away from rather than toward involvement. The allure of disengagement is a recurrent and popular American motif: Innumerable films, from Five Easy Pieces to the more recent Looking for Mr. Goodbar, revolve around some aspect of our incapacity for sustained emotional commitment, and it is the favored subject of that elusive cultural avatar, Bob Dylan. What Martin manages to convey, in language all the more resonant for being so determinedly low-keyed, is...