SOURCE: “The Man From Auschwitz,” in New York Times Book Review, October 31, 1993, pp. 13-14.

In the following review, Busch offers tempered evaluation of Pictures at an Exhibition, which he describes as “alternately horrifying and annoying.”

In Pictures at an Exhibition, D. M. Thomas returns to the world of The White Hotel, his third and most celebrated novel. In that earlier book, as in Pictures at an Exhibition, Freudian analysis figures significantly. In each, unhappy sexuality drives the dreams of patients, and in each the novel feels like a dream (or nightmare). In each, death oppresses doctors and patients (and readers) alike. And, in each, we relive a horrible slaughter of Jews—in The White Hotel, it is the mass killing at Babi Yar; in Pictures at an Exhibition, it is Auschwitz and other killing camps of the Holocaust, and the murder of 90 Jewish children in the Ukraine.

The...