What "The White Hotel" sets out to perform, clearly, is the diagnosis of our epoch through the experience of an individual; and the highest praise I can give it is that for some time it comes close to achieving that goal. Indeed, the opening sections of the novel are so authoritative and imaginatively daring that I quickly came to feel I had found the book, that mythical book, that would explain us to ourselves. The letters among the analysts (Ferenczi, Sachs, Freud), for instance, are themselves quite fine: playful and somber, full of information and suffused with a sense of high, shared purpose.

But it is in the first of Lisa's compositions that Mr. Thomas comes closest to realizing his high ambitions. Not that these lines, scribbled on the score of "Don Giovanni," are more than the "poor verses" Freud calls them. It is precisely because Mr. Thomas...