Beyond Pleasure and Pain

By Paul Gray

THE WHITE HOTEL by D.M. Thomas; Viking; 274pages; $12.95

Blame literary fashion or the Zeitgeist, but novels seem to be growing ever less capacious. Those that find room for historical sweep or the intricacies of public affairs can usually squeeze in only pasteboard heroes and heroines. The ones that concentrate on fine-tuned psyches or dark nights of the soul generally admit the outside world as nothing more than a nuisance or irrelevant noise. Fewer and fewer new novels attempt to bridge this gap, to extend complex characters beyond the tight little domain of solipsism.

The White Hotel tries to do just that and, to a startling degree, succeeds. English Author D.M. Thomas, 46, creates an intensely private heroine to whom extraordinarily public things happen. During the course of her fictional life, Lisa Erdman, a modestly talented opera singer of Polish and Ukrainian descent, is forced to make two journeys that propel her around the perimeter of 20th century imagination. She is treated for sexual hysteria by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and, years later, murdered by Nazi soldiers at Babi Yar.

This bare premise sounds more than a little exploitative. It promises sex, violence, a woman stripped of her privacy, the sadistic pornography of totalitarianism. But such subjects should not be denied to serious writers simply because they are so often displayed cheaply. Thomas' treatment of his heroine and her fate easily transcends titillation. Those who come to his novel with prurient interests alone will quickly grow baffled and bored.

The novel opens with some apparently random letters from Freud and an associate, then shifts to a 13-page poem that reads like a dream fugue of eroticism and premonitions of doom. A woman and a faceless lover fetch up at "a white lakeside hotel" and make love incessantly and imaginatively. Meanwhile, other guests drown when a pleasure boat on the lake goes down in a sudden high wind; a wing of the hotel burns to the ground, killing many others. The poem is followed by an expanded prose version of the same fantasy. This time the woman's lover is Freud's son; the disasters expand to include a landslide and a cable car that plunges to earth. New guests regularly replace the dead at the white hotel. The woman's breasts flow with milk, which she gives freely to everyone: "She wondered if she had grown obsessed with sex." She confides this fear to her lover: "And if I'm not thinking about sex, I'm thinking about death."

The poem and its prose companion, it then turns out, have been given to Freud ,by Lisa Erdman, their author and his patient. She is suffering from i shortness of breath and debilitating pain in her left breast and left ovary. Conventional medical treatment circa 1919 has failed to cure her. Perhaps Freud's newfangled methods will help?

The story of Lisa's psychoanalysis is told by Freud himself. Thomas' imitation of a Freudian case history is uncannily accurate and convincing. It has the same whodunit intensity of the originals, the same bristling of symbols, the same gentle prodding to make the patient reveal more than she wants to know. Though Lisa resists him at many turns, Freud traces her problem back to a scene she accidentally stumbled across in childhood: a menage a trois involving her uncle, her mother and her aunt. Lisa does not accept her analyst's conclusion that she is a homosexual, but the sessions manage, as Freud hopes, to turn her "hysterical misery into common unhappiness."

Life and a late marriage take her ultimately to Kiev. She is there in 1941 when the Germans invade and order all Jews to board trains for Palestine. Half Jewish, Lisa accepts this opportunity to get her Jewish stepson out of the ghetto. Their true destination is a ravine that will serve as a mass grave. Their end is ghastly.

Except that, in this novel, they do not end. In the final chapter, Lisa and her stepson arrive at a place that might be Palestine. Refugees are streaming in, including friends whom Lisa thought dead. Oddly, Freud, who died in 1939, is there too, as is her mother, who perished in a hotel fire decades earlier. The two women walk and talk calmly about the mother's infidelities and the daughter's response, so many years ago. Their milk flows. They are happy, beyond pleasure and pain.

Thomas' conclusion is audacious, yet it seems exactly right for all that has gone before. Given the many mysteries in Lisa's life, the last one is almost commonplace. The White Hotel has its flaws. The break between Lisa the patient and Lisa the victim is too abrupt; she seems transformed less by analysis than by the demands of her author's design. But this novel is a reminder that fiction can amaze as well as inform, that an imaginative leap can sometimes take flight. Thomas' talent almost matches his worthwhile ambition: to fuse the dreams of self with the nightmare of history. --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"During the night, the bodies settled. A hand would adjust, by a fraction, causing another's head to turn slightly. Features imperceptibly altered. 'The trembling of the sleeping night,' Pushkin called it; only he was referring to the settling of a house.

The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored. Most of the dead were poor and illiterate. But every single one of them had dreamed dreams, seen visions and had amazing experiences, even the babes in arms (perhaps especially the babes in arms)... If a Sigmund Freud had been listening and taking notes from the time of Adam, he would still not fully have explored even a single group, even a single person.

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