BOOKS
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over port in the evening at one's club) and misses the rigor of Freud's
actual reports.
It
does not give the reader the pay-off he has been
waiting for. Freud resembles a sort of upgraded Dr. Watson,
pushing along good naturedly, making no more than predictable
insights . Once again Thomas asks us to wait, since the puzzle is not
solved, and since, as it turns out, much of what Lisa tells the doctor
is lies. We learn this later, and never know sufficient truth about her
to approach the problem of analyzing her fantasies, even in retro–
spect, with any confidence. Thomas defers and defers, and at the
end distracts our attention, hoping we will have forgotten how much
he promised to tell us, how much, in truth, he owes us.
It
strains
credulity that Lisa would lie to him as much as she does, resistance
notwithstanding, or that she would leave so much out in the reci–
tation of her history. She has no real motive for this, psychoanalyti–
cally speaking, and Thomas simply makes her do it, for structural
reasons , so as to surprise the reader towards the end when yet
another version emerges. The whole section is a gloss - nicely
written, but intellectually superficial, self-consciously clever, and
awkwardly poised between parody and reverence.
Conventional narrative begins about halfway through the book
with scenes of Lisa, symptoms more or less abated, as a second level
opera singer interacting with colleagues, friends, and family . For
this reader, at least, she remains a cipher. Thomas tells us all sorts of
things, but he fails to dramatize, and we remain outside the story.
We do not connect with gay Vienna, luxury hotels, or the joys of
making music, we simply take Thomas's word for it all and continue
to read , still searching for a way to bring the book together.
Towards the end we realize we've been had. Lisa is at Kiev with
an adopted son, and they are killed at Babi Yar. The book, which
had deferred so much, changes the terms of the contract. Babi Yar is
a non sequitur, part of a game the author is playing, and the work
the reader has done on Lisa has been a trick. Thomas never knew
any more about her than the reader, that is to say very little , and one
dismally concludes she will never ramify. She was never really there .
Of Babi Yar, Thomas writes:
"The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or
explored."·
•An unallributed quote of Heraclitus, which Thomas may well have run across on page 209
of Jones'
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.
Jones explains that these are the words of
Heraclitus. Thomas does no!.
