SOURCE: “Sigmund's Our Guy,” in Times Literary Supplement, April 22, 1994, p. 21.

In the following review, Dinnage offers favorable assessment of Eating Pavlova.

Freud had no use for the Surrealists, though they thought they were his true disciples; his artistic tastes were conventional, classical, Goethean. What would he have made of the novels of D. M. Thomas? The White Hotel, in particular, seemed to be the first truly Freudian novel, both in subject-matter and style. Now, in Eating Pavlova, Thomas, in the same rich and cloudy manner, has produced a set of variations on the life of Freud himself.

An old Jewish refugee (his name never mentioned) is dying in a house in Hampstead, looked after by his dedicated daughter. Between doses of morphia, he drifts from sleeping to waking, from past to present and to future as well—since, as he once said, “time does not exist in the...