SOURCE: "Disintegrated Lives," in The New York Times Book Review, March 13, 1994, p. 7.

Houston is a novelist and educator. In the following mixed review, he discusses the themes, plot, and subplots of The Great Divorce.

In this, her first novel since her successful Mary Reilly, Valerie Martin has again proved she knows how to keep a story's velocity high and its plot tuning corners smartly. How much of the three intertwined stories in The Great Divorce a reader will happily accept, however, may depend on her or his degree of willingness to suspend disbelief. Those who accept a thing as real in fiction because the author says it is will have no quibbles with the book; crankier readers, who believe a thing ain't so until the writer makes it a convincing fictional probability, may find themselves somewhat less content.

The book's controlling metaphor is provided by the actual divorce...