It's not really necessary, of course, for a reviewer to make the plot entirely clear to prospective readers. But in Ararat, the whole point is the plot—its devilish cleverness, or its maddening obscurity, however you choose to view it. In any case, it's not an honest plot. If a contract exists between writer and reader that the writer will do his best to draw the reader in and the reader will do his best to follow, D. M. Thomas reneged on his part of the deal. To be fair, he didn't even agree to make the deal. He blurs events—the whole point is their blurring—and he swerves and doubles back in hope of losing us. And if we hang on, against all odds, and stick with his tale to the end, we're not rewarded with the final "Ah, now I see!" that would have made the hanging on worthwhile.

The central male figures of these stories—even Pushkin …—tend to melt together; no distinction is made between their various personalities. In fact, there's a deliberate attempt to merge them, to imply that these are really inner chambers of one and the same man. All of them are self-centered, self-indulgent, and unlikable. Rozanov is sleeping with the blind woman because "he had never slept with a blind woman," but he's disgusted by her thin legs and her "wandering, unattached pupils." The dream Surkov deflowers a childish little Polish gymnast and then feels oppressed by her ("I burn up women as a marathon runner burns up his flesh," he says), and the real-life Surkov, who shares Rozanov's distaste for thin legs, has the same attitude of conquest toward all the women he meets. Even the Armenian …, while a gentler man than the others, cannot function sexually until his partner has bitten his hand to draw blood and he has called her a "foul name." In general, sex on these pages is violent, unloving, and unpleasant.

The book's effect, a publisher's blurb tells us, is that of opening one of those little Russian dolls and finding other dolls inside. But it's not, exactly. The dolls inside those Russian dolls are different from each other, each with its own unique little face and costume. The dolls inside this novel are indistinguishable. Evidently the point is that there is no true invention in storytelling. Willy-nilly, the narrator passes his own traits and prejudices on to his characters; his characters are inextricable from him.

Ararat takes its title from its preoccupation with the Armenian diaspora of 1915. The shipboard Surkov, the one of the dream, is followed about by an old man who compulsively relates all the atrocities he has committed in his lifetime—or in several lifetimes, perhaps, for what he's describing is every instance of mass brutality that occurred during the twentieth century…. Special emphasis, however, is placed upon the Armenian events, and it's a mark of this book's strangeness that these horrors—chillingly, meticulously described—fill the only scenes in this book where there's the slightest bit of humor. If humor is what you want to call it.

The old man's appalling coolness as he catalogs his crimes is in itself funny, in a dreadful way. "… altogether there has been great exaggeration of the numbers killed," he says. "It is certain that no more than a million were killed." (pp. 30-1)

In The White Hotel, the account of the Nazi atrocities appeared to have some point; everything led up to it, and there was a moment where the reader heard that satisfying click of things coming together. The White Hotel was disturbing to read, but one felt it was necessarily disturbing. Ararat disturbs without purpose. The Armenian tragedy is merely one more quirky scene in a book that's full of quirky scenes.

Finally, Ararat lacks power. It seems almost to be consciously undermining its power—breaking off each narrative sweep the moment we're caught up in it, beaching us once again, leaving us looking around in bewilderment. Books are meant to carry us to other lives, I figure. When a book drives its readers to diagraming the plot, you know it's not going to carry you very far. (p. 32)