D. M. Thomas gives himself many problems in The White Hotel. The novel, part epistolary, part poetic, part narrative, tells the story of the half-Russian, half-Jewish singer, Lisa Erdman. She becomes a patient of Freud, after the first world war, in order to cure herself of hysterical sexual fantasies, which she envisages taking place in a white hotel. Psychoanalysis with Freud enables her to take up her operatic career again and return to Stalinist Russia, only to be trapped by the Nazis at the beginning of the next war. Her fate at Babi Yar is the same as that of so many Jews consumed in the holocaust.

Several problems arise. Thomas represents—first in poetry and then in prose—Lisa's sexual delirium. How successfully can he, being a man, do this? Then, there is no doubt that the accounts of Lisa's stay at the White Hotel with Freud's...