SOURCE: “Isadora's Scarf and Other Secrets,” in New York Times Book Review, January 18, 1987, p. 6.

In the following review, Stade offers positive evaluation of Sphinx.

American readers know D. M. Thomas best for The White Hotel (1981), a novel remarkable for its tragic sense of recent history, its resolute humanism, its formal virtuosity. As much may be said for Mr. Thomas's new novel, Sphinx, “the third of four improvisational novels,” as he describes them in a note. The first of the three we have is Ararat (1983): the second Swallow (1984). Mr. Thomas dedicates the quartet to Pushkin—many of the characters are Russian, and much of the action takes place in Russia, at moments from Pushkin's time through the purges of the 1930's to the recent past.

The novels are “improvisational” in a number of senses. For one thing, most of the characters are poets or liars or spies or quick-witted...