Volume 28, Number 9 · May 28, 1981
No Reservations
By George Levine
The White Hotel
by D.M. Thomas
Viking, 274 pp., $12.95
D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel is a novel of immense ambition and virtuosity. With the strength of its precise and risky use of language, it moves us from the self into history, subjecting the self to relentless analysis, subjecting history to the intrusions of the self, implying that both will elude analysis and judgment. The novel begins in a documentary way, with a letter dated September 8, 1909, describing Freud and Jung's voyage to America for the famous seminar at Clark University. It ends somewhere beyond history, in a place never defined—perhaps at last the promised land—inhabited only by the dead, who act with the complexity and pain of the living. Between these extremes, we follow the life of a fictional woman, Elisabeth Erdman, a singer who comes to Vienna from Russia and then returns there, and who finally dies at Babi Yar.
Review, 3762 words
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