SOURCE: “Elaborate and Perverse,” in Nation, April 23, 1983, pp. 516-18.

In the following review, Dickstein offers unfavorable evaluation of Ararat.

The reader opens Ararat with a mixture of expectations. D. M. Thomas's third novel in four years, it comes in the wake of the literary and commercial success of The White Hotel, and the more equivocal reception accorded his translations of Pushkin's poems, The Bronze Horseman, which Simon Karlinsky and others have called a plagiarism of other translators. While Ararat will do little to dispel the doubts that hang over Thomas's literary reputation, it may help clarify what he considers to be authorship.

The question here is not that of plagiarism but of literary license and influence. It is axiomatic that translators rely on the inspiration of their original authors, but Thomas seems to have based most of his fiction on this premise. As a novelist, he has taken...