SOURCE: “The Superpower Superjoke,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 7, 1988, p. 3.

In the following review, Eder offers unfavorable assessment of Summit.

When God rested on the seventh day. He really did rest. No phone calls. No catching up on the mail. No reorganizing the files. And no fooling around with little toy worlds after working all week on the big one.

In his Soviet trilogy—Ararat, Swallow, and Sphinx—the novelist D. M. Thomas built a complex, bravura game of narrative Chinese boxes. His characters turned into characters written or related by other characters who, in turn, dissolved into the dream states of still others.

It was extravagant and sometimes out of hand, but usually fun and often thrilling. The thrill came from the seriousness to which the fun attached. The characters—poets, police spys, historical figures, and assorted Moscow denizens—tossed comically about; but what tossed...