SOURCE: “A Pornographic Universe,” in Times Literary Supplement, January 29, 1993, p. 20.

In the following review, Cheyette offers negative assessment of Pictures at an Exhibition.

The key to Pictures at an Exhibition, D. M. Thomas's tenth novel, can be found in the themes and content of his best-selling third novel, The White Hotel (1981). The earlier book generated a great deal of controversy, largely because of Thomas's shameless plundering of Anatoli Kuznetsov's account of the massacre of over 70,000 Jews in Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev, in September 1941. Thomas's reworking of Kuznetsov's Babi Yar so as to include the sadistic rape of his fictional heroine, Lisa Erdman, caused an outcry. It was not just that Thomas rewrote an essential memoir in lurid terms, but, more worrying, that he was prepared to sacrifice the historical victims of genocide on the altar of his prevailing metaphors. In The White Hotel, these metaphors...