[In the following, Broyard offers a negative assessment of Alexandra.]

Claude, the narrator of Alexandra, describes his past life as "pennypinching, joyless tedium," and I'm afraid that to me he remains tedious. Though he is only 49 years old, he says, "My hands and feet are stiff with arthritis, my back aches, and it hurts to straighten my knees." Spiritually he's not very limber either.

When Alexandra, the heroine of Valerie Martin's second novel, asks Claude whether he has ever been married, he says, "I've not had that good fortune." When he gets off a feeble riposte, he remarks, "I heard myself with satisfaction." After his first night in bed with Alexandra, he says: "She was delighted with my performance and I admit to being pleased with myself. Such powerful and satisfying passion had not so emboldened or sustained me in a long time …"

It sounds as if he's not at home in the English language, or in the world, either. Nor is he a man one looks forward to knowing better.

Alexandra is beautiful, so beautiful that she makes other people "look unevolved." What she makes me do is wonder whether the beautiful woman is not a cliché in fiction, a stock character who begs the question of character, whose behavior, through some convolution of snobbery, is assumed to be significant simply because she is beautiful.

Alexandra works as a bartender, an unusual job for a beautiful woman, one that attests to her inscrutability. Yes, she's inscrutable as well as beautiful, and at the risk of seeming querulous, I confess to being fed up with inscrutability as well as with beauty. I don't believe in it. I find inscrutable people not mysterious, but blocked or neurotic.

In Alexandra's case, inscrutability means she prefers to have Claude go home after making love to her. It means that we don't know why she sees him. It means that she has no books, pictures, records or television in her apartment. To compensate for this absence of motivation, Miss Martin makes a fuss over Alexandra's boots and their interminable laces.

Alexandra also throws knives as a hobby. I was reminded of an inscrutable middle-aged couple in a novel by Thomas McGuane who warmed up for their lovemaking by jumping on a trampoline. It's a strenuous business, inscrutability.

Claude is persuaded by Alexandra to quit his job—he is a petty Civil Service clerk—and run away with her to a Shangri La in the bayous outside of New Orleans. This palace or plantation belongs to Diana, whose relation to Alexandra is best described as Gothic. Diana is pregnant and wants Alexandra to assist her in natural childbirth.

Diana is even taller than Alexandra "well over six feet." (Is the book a tall story?) The father of the child has been dismissed. He is described simply as "short." Diana is beautiful, too. She says: "That's why I wanted a child, to share that with. There's not much chance of his being anything but beautiful. And even if he isn't, I hope to impart to him some sense of what beauty deserves, in all its manifestations."

At Diana's place, several uninteresting questions are raised and left untantalizingly open. Do she and Alexandra have a lesbian relationship? Did Alexandra stab one of Diana's lovers in a motel, or is Banjo, the black family retainer, lying? Why does Banjo keep altering the maze he has cut in the woods? Why does Diana—or is it Alexandra?—kick Claude in the ribs when he collapses with fever in the maze?

Diana plays the piano, and Alexandra sings in Italian, though she is supposed to be nearly illiterate. Claude says: "My heart was lifted by the sight of them, all lost in the music, intent, transported by their friendship, their beauty, and their power. They were not ordinary women. No, I thought then, they are mad and cruel and wear their freedom like a mantle …"

It is Claude, not Alexandra, who helps Diana deliver her baby—something has to be found for him to do. After the baby is born, they share a blood bond—the sort of tie one finds only in Southern novels—and live inscrutably forever after.

I enjoyed Miss Martin's first novel, Set in Motion, and I hope she can recover from Alexandra. It would not surprise me to learn that Alexandra was conceived, or perhaps even written, before the other book. If that's the case, then Miss Martin will have safely put this sort of thing behind her.