Readers of "Ararat," D. M. Thomas's new novel, will recognize its similarities to his earlier "The White Hotel."… To many critics "The White Hotel" seemed an unusual and major work, attempting to treat the largest subjects of our time—World War II, its relation to modern consciousness as described by Freud, and the implications of Freud for the writer of fiction—through the story of a young woman patient of Freud. "Ararat" shares these preoccupations—in particular the Freudian conjunction of sexuality and death; this time they are approached through the story of Cleopatra and her lovers and in the reminiscences of a mysterious figure, encountered on a dreamlike sea voyage, who obsessively recounts his part in all of the terrible massacres of modern history. Like the earlier work, "Ararat" provides an abundant display of the author's astonishing virtuosity in poetry, in prose, in translating—a writer combining an impassioned European soul with the formal instincts of a spider weaving an immensely complex, elegant and sophisticated web.

A close description of "Ararat" reveals a congruity of subject and form, that of a story within a story within a story. In the first framing story, a Russian poet, Rozanov, travels to Gorki on an erotic whim, to sleep with a blind woman who has written a fan letter to him, but whom, in the event, he finds boring. To beguile the night that he must in all politeness spend with her, he improvises a narrative to amuse her on a subject of her choosing: "Improvisation." His narrative begins with a second framing story in which three writers, drinking together in an Armenian hotel, challenge each other to a competition of improvisations; Rozanov then improvises these improvisations. The first teller begins a tale of Surkov, a Russian poet on his way to America by sea. On shipboard Surkov completes an unfinished fragment of Pushkin's "Egyptian Nights."

In Pushkin's fragment, a Russian poet, Charsky, befriends an Italian improvvisatore, who gives a dazzling public performance in verse on a subject proposed by someone in the fashionable St. Petersburg audience Charsky has assembled for him. The improviser's subject is Cleopatra and her lovers, three men who have by lot drawn the chance to spend a night with her and who will face execution in the morning. The third lover is a youth, very beautiful, at the beginning of life. Pushkin's fragment breaks off here. D. M. Thomas's Rozanov's Surkov's improvvisatore continues the tale to a satisfactory and amusing conclusion. Surkov must then go on to finish the tale of Charsky and the improviser; Rozanov must finish the tale of Surkov and two other tales, ostensibly by the two other writers.

The second writer continues the story of Surkov, now arriving in America by plane, the sea voyage having been only an anxiety dream in the mind of the apprehensive traveler, who, now in New York, plans to set down on paper the amazing improvisation on Pushkin which he has dreamed. Surkov's tale ceases, but he figures in the tale of the last speaker, an American writer of Armenian descent, who brings the two earlier speakers and herself to Ararat, the sacred Armenian mountain where in tradition Noah's ark came to rest. Then in an epilogue we return to Rozanov, and a reminder that these stories are only his contrivances which, in the course of our reading, have absorbed us in their reality.

The power of an artist, in his work, is absolute. When Surkov is finishing Pushkin's tale, he brings Charsky and the Italian improviser to a conclusion he does not like: The improviser has been made to face a duel, and when he and Charsky arrive at the appointed place, they hear that Pushkin has just been fatally wounded in an earlier duel with his brother-in-law D'Anthes (a historical fact). Surkov decides that if his improvisation had not included certain things, Pushkin would not have fought, and he rewrites the ending, in the second version sacrificing the improviser and attempting thereby to alter history….

In this tale the artist is God creating order, and he can be as arbitrary. In elaborately framed narratives such as these, the reader may resent being torn from one interesting situation and made to face another. But Mr. Thomas's powers are such, and the faintly repellent qualities of his protagonists are such, and the formal elements are so clearly going to prevail over the purely narrative elements, that we do not mind; in fact part of the pleasure we take in the work is in seeing the pieces fit together, and in Mr. Thomas's omniscient foresight: Art—or fiction—is the true subject of "Ararat."

Mr. Thomas's elaborate constructions have provoked reproaches for not being all "made up." "The White Hotel" draws upon the recorded testimony of a woman who had been at Babi Yar, material from Freud, lines from Yeats—all properly attributed, of course, by Mr. Thomas, who had done no more than the author of any "true-life novel" to document the congruence of truth and fiction. Yet the uneasiness provoked by "The White Hotel" seemed to testify more to a general discomfort with his protean powers of projection and assimilation—his witchery: "I can't help being others. I can't help becoming others. Everyone, everything," exclaims the writer Surkov in "Ararat."

We usually admire extremes of artifice—things made in miniature, purses made of stitches too tiny to see, projects which reveal that the artist has gone to an immense lot of trouble to make a thing that seems like nature but is not. Yet some critics have faulted "The White Hotel" for the conjunction of its ambitious themes—eros and thanatos, the Holocaust—and its formal virtuosity, as if fiction, with its elements of artifice and imitation, somehow does a disservice to the reality of events; implicit in this criticism is the notion that some aspects of history are so solemn they can never be a suitable subject for art (which is one theory of why there are no great Holocaust novels, unless you consider "The White Hotel" one). But if some subjects can be too large for art, there must be other subjects of perfect proportion; "Ararat," a work of artifice about artifice, a formal work about form, risks less, perhaps, but seems a work of perfect proportion. (p. 7)