Eating Pavlova

Thomas, whose best-known if not best book remains The White Hotel, is his haunted, obsessive self in this tour de force that combines two of his passionate interests: the dark corners of psychiatry and the ironies of history. He imagines Sigmund Freud as he lies dying in London just before WWII, tenderly nursed by daughter Anna. A tumble of reminiscences, dreams and regrets fills Freud's mind as he recalls his wife, her sister, Freiberg, Vienna and such towering figures in his life as Fleiss and Jung. Fragments of his diary may or may not be true-they may in fact be designed to mislead the faithful Anna about difficult passages of his life. He imagines scenes as they might be fictionalized, showing himself alternately priapic, jealous, remote, complaisant. After a concluding series of dreams, Thomas slyly offers Freud's unconcerned, cut-and-dried interpretations, whereas the reader can see the dreams for the prescient visions they are of the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb, the postwar world. It is a brilliant performance, but unlike such more strongly felt recent Thomas novels as Pictures at an Exhibition and Flying in to Love, it seems no more than just that. (Oct.)