The Great Divorce - Hardcover

Martin, Valerie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385421257 ISBN 13: 9780385421256

Publisher: Nan A. Talese, 1994

Synopsis

While trying to contain the infectious disease that is threatening the animals at the New Orleans zoo where she is a veterinarian, Ellen struggles to treat her ailing marriage. By the author of Mary Reilly. 20,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo. Tour.

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Reviews

Early in Martin's mesmerizing and moving new novel, Ellen Clayton, one of the three women whose lives are chronicled here, reads a magazine article titled, "The Great Divorce." Its subject is "the breakup between the human species and the rest of nature," and this is Martin's theme here too. Ellen, a vet at the New Orleans zoo, is pessimistic about the balance between humanity and nature. "Zoos operated as arks, holding animals for the future, but it was a future that would never come." In this story it is not only wild animals that are doomed. So is Ellen's marriage to Paul, a habitual philanderer in search of emotional "liberty," who finally leaves her for a younger woman; so is Camille, a young keeper of the cats at the zoo who feels she has no place in society and no chance for happiness; and so is a heroine we meet in flashback, Elizabeth Boyer Schlaeger, called "the catwoman," who in 1846 was hanged for murdering her tyrannical husband. Martin interweaves these stories with virtuosic dexterity, making an implicit comparison between a lithe black leopard at the zoo and a similar creature into which Elizabeth claimed she was transformed, meanwhile effectively underscoring the tension between an idealized notion of benign nature and the reality of red tooth and claw. Her assured portraits of people and zoo inmates counterpoint the need for freedom, "the spirit of rage against imprisonment," that drives all species. In a neatly calibrated narrative, she juxtaposes mundane domestic scenes with those of high gothic horror: the murder victim, his throat slashed, lying in carmine gore while his demented wife, her mouth and hands smeared with his blood, serenely plays the piano he had locked away from her. In Mary Reilly and her other novels, Martin revealed herself as a highly imaginative raconteur who can invest even the most bizarre situation with psychological validity. Here she reveals profound truths about human nature while telling a powerful story of primitive emotions. Major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Martin's first novel since Mary Reilly (1990) masterfully weaves together three tales about the great divorce between two women-- separated by 150 years--and their husbands, and between the human species and the rest of nature. Ellen Clayton is a New Orleans zoo veterinarian whose writer husband Paul's affections are cooling again because he's found a younger lover. But this time it's different: Paul's fallen in love with his mistress and dreams of divorce. Much of the time he's away from Ellen and their daughters, Celia and Lillian, he's actually spending with Donna, but when he's working, it's on a book about ``cat woman'' Elisabeth Schlaeger--the only white woman ever executed in Louisiana after killing her wealthy husband Hermann in 1845. Elisabeth's story, which soon detaches itself from Paul, unfolds in an inexorable pattern of domination by a cruel, fascinated husband determined to assert his mastery over her. Back in the present, Camille, the keeper of the zoo's wild cats, contemplates her affinity with an ailing black leopard named Magda--a bonding so close it echoes Elisabeth's claim that she killed Hermann after her spirit entered the body of a great black cat--as she stumbles through a procession of beastly gropings that pass for love. All three agonized heroines (four, if you count Magda) wrestle with the paradox of a civilization whose mores sink its members ever deeper into savagery. Though it lacks the high concept of Mary Reilly--the cat woman is no match for Jekyll and Hyde's maid--Martin's novel gathers a quietly, painfully gripping force. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Three interwoven stories make up this eminently readable and well-written novel by the author of Mary Reilly ( LJ 1/90). Ellen, a zoo veterinarian, is trying to cope with both a mysterious outbreak of illness among the animals and the knowledge that Paul, her historian husband, has fallen in love with a younger woman. Elisabeth, the subject of Paul's researches, is the legendary "cat woman" of Louisiana, who allegedly became a leopard and murdered her abusive husband. Camille, a worker at the zoo who has a seemingly tenuous grasp on reality, has frightening fantasies that she is becoming one of the great cats she works with at the zoo. The story's only weakness is that the cause of Camille's initial breakdown is never made clear. However, this is a very satisfying novel with well-drawn, sympathetic female characters. Highly recommended for public libraries of all sizes. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/93.
- Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Martin is the author of seven novels, but not until the sixth, Mary Reilly (1989), the story of the young maidservant of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic fictional character, Dr. Jekyll, did she really establish herself. But many readers will conclude that her latest effort falls short of that high-water mark. In it, Martin weaves past and present, ecology and psychology, into a detailed picture of the mystical unseparateness of all souls, human and otherwise. The place is New Orleans, and we're presented with three main characters from the present, plus one from the past. Ellen is a veterinarian; her husband, Paul, is a writer; Camille is a keeper at the zoo; and in counterpoint to contemporary times is Elisabeth Schlaeger, "the catwoman of St. Francisville." Ellen is preoccupied on two levels: professionally, she is troubled because of a viral outbreak among the zoo animals, and personally, she is distracted because her marriage is on the skids. Paul is busy with his new young lover and his research on Elisabeth Schlaeger, the only white woman ever to be hanged in Louisiana for murder, for the horrible mutilation of her husband (the time was the early nineteenth century). Camille is a troubled young woman who feels a peculiar connectedness to the cats in her care at the zoo, in part because she feels that her true self is a wild animal. Somehow the reader is supposed to draw all these story elements together, apparently into a multipanel view of the fact that we aren't much different from the beasts of the fields and the forest whom we like to believe we're superior to. Expect high demand because of its predecessor's popularity, but expect readers' disappointment, too. Brad Hooper

Edition details

• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385421257
• ISBN 13: 9780385421256
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 340