In 1824 Sam Goldwyn, recognizing that “there is nothing really so entertaining as a really great love story,” set out to comb the world for the really greatest love story of them all. In pursuit of this majestic quest, he resolved to call on “the greatest love specialist in the world,” Sigmund Freud, and induce him to “commercialize his study and write a story for the screen.” Freud responded with a one-sentence letter: “I do not intend to see Mr. Goldwyn.”

Seventy years later, D. M. Thomas, who had employed Freud earlier in his novel The White Hotel (1981), has better luck, probably because the love story he wants Freud to write, and actually coaxes him into writing, is so much more harrowing, funny and kind than anything Mr. Goldwyn would have warmed to. In his brilliant new novel, Eating Pavlova, Mr. Thomas grabs Freud just in time, only a day or two before his death in September 1939, and snatches for us these final imaginary memoirs: the dreams, recollections, hallucinations, fictions and elaborate lies of the most devious and tragically generous Freud ever envisioned.

Throughout Eating Pavlova (the title, like everything else in this novel, carries about a dozen teasing associations—to, among others, the dancer, the dessert, Pavlov and his dogs and Freud's dear daughter Anna), Freud is in London, “finding it is harder to die than I had anticipated.” His jaw is reduced to a set of cancerous perforations (“there's a hole right through to my cheek”), and out of the pain and the haze of age, morphine, guilt and fear, he recounts his life—or makes up his life. Perhaps he even starts now to live it, in the sense that he forms his life into a story with a purpose, even if that purpose can no longer avail him anything.

Responding only to his physician, Schur, and his faithful daughter Anna (who contributes an erotic short story to the stew), this Freud lets loose his memory, his analytic powers, material from his famous case studies, his libido, his storytelling craft—“I should have been Rabelais or Cervantes”—and his extraordinary generosity in order to confront and contort a moving, dangerous and funny past. In his account, time has no meaning, mistakes “inevitably creep” in and dreams are actually given priority over a very dubious “reality.” Freud's very being often seems to him fictional, and the central extended story of his cuckolding is, he admits, “a Jewish joke,” nothing but a pack of lies—maybe.

It is a measure of Freud's genius—and Mr. Thomas's—that as we read we become less involved with sorting lie from truth (or lie from lie) than in investigating whether lies might not be somehow more “true to life, to history,” certainly more true to the needs of the human heart. Freud tells us (or tells Anna, his true audience) that he has forged a series of letters to his sister-in-law, seeking to console her for the loss of a lover. Pretending to be the preposterous (and somewhat sinister) Wilhelm Fliess, scarcely able to distinguish between noses and vaginas, Freud portrays himself as a corresponding maniac, asking Minna for erotic reveries, then nude photographs and finally a proof of her love that can be produced only if she seduces Freud.

And that's not all: Freud's wife reads these erotic forged letters years later and is so kindled by them that she begins a quasi affair with the heretofore impotent Herr Bauer (the father of the famous “Dora”), reducing Freud to hiding, with binoculars, in the shrubbery and, in the climactic scene, charging in on the lovers, being told to “beat it, Sigi,” and dragging the wallowing, sweating Bauer off his wife.

Why does he concoct such a frenzied and disgraceful romp? Not, it appears, so we or Anna will believe it, exactly; but in order to explore possibilities within himself and to escape for a moment the true horrors: In the end, guilt “reaches unbearable proportions and we have no choice but to die, to escape.” Also, and most important for Mr. Thomas's tragic vision, we are allowed to feel that Freud does all this as a final gift to his daughter, a way of releasing her from his power. He has seen that he and Anna were “like two climbers roped together, like those English climbers who vanished, a year or two ago, while heading for the peak of Everest,” and he is trying not to take her with him as he disappears over the edge. In Mr. Thomas's version of King Lear, Anna—“I ask her to undo a button”—is not hauled off to prison, is not hanged as a poor fool. She is released into new life.

But maybe not. Nothing in Mr. Thomas's book is quite this smooth, as his sardonic irony keeps undercutting the simple readings we might want to impose. Like Freud, he will not minister easy consolation. Anna's feeling that life “is like a farm that I'm just visiting on holiday” is never erased; and, even more ironic, the final view we get of her makes us wonder if she was worth all the trouble: in her swan song, she grumps so vapidly about the decline in high culture that she seems to have transmogrified into William Bennett.

Besides, Freud has gone past even his daughter's needs at the end, dreaming and writing his way into the future: through the extermination of his sisters at Auschwitz, through Hiroshima, the Eichmann trial and the charges brought against “Lolita.” Interestingly, these horrors are preludes to visions that ought to be utopian, visions of the untrammeled libido: gay bathhouses and, unforgettably, modern supermarkets, where anything can be taken without even asking, where “mankind is sating its libido”—and nobody is happy. Well, Freud says, it seems that, after all, “people don't want happiness.”

Such stoic wit sustains Freud and this extraordinary novel as well. It was such wit, both furious and resigned, that allowed the historical Freud to mock the Gestapo to their faces—“I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone”—putting at risk his own escape. And it is with a similar elegant wit that Mr. Thomas escorts the novel from nightmare into high tragic compassion and then to a muted and unprotected quietness at the end, with nothing to sustain the goodbye but courage and a fiercely honest art. As Freud fades away, a friend floats into his dream and greets him, “How are you, Professor?” “Dying; otherwise, fine,” he says. Not a bad way to go.