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PARTISAN REVIEW
pompous historian, a few fading musicians, some frustrated women,
a child prodigy, several simple-minded tradesmen, two aging,
born-again prostitutes. Nothing serious happens or is talked about–
which I take to be faintly representative of the emptiness of middle–
class life, particularly at a summer resort. Nor does the ending,
which has the bewildered vacationers crammed into the trains
transporting them east, have any melodrama or false pathos - as
does, for example, the slaughter of the Jews at Babi Yar at the close
of
The White Hotel,
which is supposed to give sex a symbolic meaning
and to redeem its pornographic treatment in the earlier sections of
the novel.
It would be unfortunate if what might be called the new fiction
with a humanist face were to sanction a return to social realism . But
it does suggest that the novel of sensibility might be played out. And
the new realism current in this country has too banal an idea of
reality to fill the void.
It
is an old story, but perhaps worth repeating, that advanced
fiction often comes out of reactionary conditions, while progressive
causes usually produce either uninteresting pedagogical writing, or
wrap themselves in fashionable literary modes of the day .
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
FREUD INTO FICTION
THE WHITE HOTEL.
By
D.M.
Thomas.
Viking. $13.95.
The White Hotel
is a clever, crossword-puzzle sort of novel
which promises a good deal more than it delivers. A rumination on
Freud's life-urge, death-urge theory from
Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
it uses the figure of Lisa Erdman, a fictional patient of the good
doctor's, to explore that idea. The formal construction of the book is
daring- seven separate sections, of contrasting modes, which come
at the story from different angles, creating the effect of the author
circling in on his subject in a spiral. In this way the structure echoes
the process of psychoanalysis.
