Lady with a Laptop

Thomas, still best known for The White Hotel, published nearly 20 years ago, is an uneven writer whose work is never less than smoothly readable but who occasionally achieves some strikingly original and moving effects. The present novel, however (its title, if not its nature, a clear homage to Chekhov's short story ""The Lady with a Lapdog""), is one of his distinctly lesser efforts, a perfectly pleasant but inconsequential picture of a group of would-be writers at a creative writing course on a Greek island and the tired English novelist who is coaching them. Thomas has some mildly sardonic fun at the expense of both class and teacher, as well as of the New Age antics of some of the other faculty; but his dramatic centerpiece, the sudden suicide of one of the more talented pupils and its impact on the others, is muffled. Oddly, the most convincing aspect of the book is the poignant onrush of nostalgic English patriotic sentiment brought on in the world-weary narrator by the memory of poet Rupert Brooke, who died and was buried on a neighboring island. (May)