When a novel called The White Hotel became a bestseller in 1981–1982, its author, D. M. Thomas, was not generally known as a poet…. Thomas is a Cornishman, not an American, and indeed his strange and fascinating novel had not become famous in Great Britain at all. Those who have read The White Hotel know that its title is the name of the long narrative poem that opens its pages, an erotic, even rather pornographic poem, and that The White Hotel of the poem is itself a fantastic place, a symbol of the female body itself, the mother's body, as projected from the deepest layer of Oedipal fantasy…. For some theorists, that place remains potentially retrievable, not in the imagination, but in reality; but how such a thing should be possible remains a mystery. Perhaps the problem of remembering the preconscious paradise of the womb's universe of oceanic bliss...