SOURCE: "The Ephemeral Triangle," in The New York Times Book Review, August 5, 1979, pp. 10, 15.

Du Plessix Gray is an American novelist, journalist, critic, and nonfiction writer. In the following review, she praises Alexandra's evocation of place, but faults Martin's characterizations and the credibility of the story line in "this bizarre neo-Gothic psychological thriller."

The principal characters of this eerie, occasionally compelling novel [Alexandra] are a 49-year-old government clerk, self-defined as "poverty-stricken, dull and thin," who lives in a Gogolian morass of bureaucratic tedium in New Orleans; a nubile woman bartender skilled in the art of knife-throwing; and her closest friend, a seductive six-foot-two heiress who dabbles in classical piano and lives on her secluded estate in the bayou country. Claude, the clerk and first-person narrator, reaches such a paradisiacal state of multiorgasmic bliss upon his first encounter with the bartender, Alexandra, that he is instantly ready to follow...