[In The White Hotel D. M. Thomas's] interweaving of psychological symbols and cultural myth, of prophetic intuition and the dismal truths of twentieth-century history, did not seem to me merely the fabric of a convincing fiction, but the brilliant representation and clarification of some troubled and important mystery at the heart of my own world.

The novel is built quite simply as an expanding spiral of explanation that centers on a single fantasy: the obsessive dream of Lisa Erdman…. She is introduced through some fictional letters between Freud and his colleagues as one of Freud's patients….

The first four sections of the novel are a marvelous exercise in antithesis: The letters between Freud and his colleagues and Freud's fictional analysis of [Anna G./Lisa Erdman] are delicious evocations, replete with footnotes, of the style, the mood, the rivalries, and the self-deceptions of the day, in splendid contrast to...