[The White Hotel] is extremely complex, ambitious and demanding. Freud himself is a central character—in itself a fair index of earnestness—and the book is largely an act of homage to the "discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis". The title-page, however, quotes Yeats … and the author does himself less than justice in describing the novel's territory as "the landscape of hysteria". He in fact moves his story beyond the Freudian confines—into a modern world where public horror can eclipse private nightmare, and finally on into a vision of an after-life. His essential concern is how we may learn to bear the contrary loads of the pleasure- and the death-instinct in our nature….

At first, though, loyally embarking under the Freudian flag, he makes some pretty unreasonable demands on unprepared readers…. The sexual fantasies of the young woman who becomes the book's chief...