SOURCE: “The Characters Are in Charge,” in New York Times Book Review, July 8, 1990, pp. 3, 19.

In the following review, Goreau offers unfavorable evaluation of Lying Together and Thomas's “Russian Nights” series. Goreau finds fault in Thomas's preoccupation with theory and ideas over plot and characters in these novels.

In his extraordinary novel The White Hotel, D. M. Thomas introduced a succession of apparently disparate “documents”—an exchange of letters between analysts; the violently erotic imaginings of a young woman recorded in blank verse between the staves of Mozart's Don Giovanni; a prose journal written by the same woman; Sigmund Freud's (fictional) case study of “Anna G.”; a traditional, third-person narrative giving the history of Frau Elisabeth Erdman, a k a Anna G.; a chilling account of the Holocaust at Babi Yar, and a surreal scene in which the resurrected heroine meets her beloved dead.

As the novel progresses, the...