Writers writing about writers have just about exhausted themselves as subject matter, and it’s not likely that D. M. Thomas’s new novel, Ararat, will revive the genre. Thomas has chosen as his central character an author much like himself, Sergei Rozanov, a poet and sometime novelist. The fact that Rozanov then decides to improvise three different stories, each of which also concerns a poet or novelist, and that one of these characters decides to write a poem about an improvisatore, a poet skilled at spur-of-the-moment improvisations on a given theme—all this only compounds the problem. One multiplies the commonplace and simply gets more of it.

Ararat’s overwrought eroticism and detailed descriptions of genocide will be familiar to readers of Thomas’s previous novel, The White Hotel; but whereas in that work each had its place and was organic to the development of the story, here it all seems to have become slightly unglued. Images of sexuality and mass murder rumble through the narrative with no more seeming direction or purpose than Rozanov’s fevered imagination.

Two of the main characters Rozanov creates are male (the one woman has only a short, perfunctory improvisation at the end); both are named Victor Surkov and both arc running a temperature through much of their stories. Rozanov, like all good Russians, is a tortured soul. Like all successful writers (or successful writers writing about writers), he expends the better part of his Angst on who he is or is not