Pale Nabokov

...Yet the milieu and fellow-exiles, as passionately full of literary nostalgia as Fyodor himself, are rendered with lively and poignant concreteness...

...Our failed-genius hero remarks that "I can commit to memory a whole page of the directory in three minutes but am incapable of remembering my own telephone number...

...In the case of Vladimir Nabokov, whom the Bolsheviks relieved of his homeland and a $2-million inheritance, art of a much higher and convolute order than either Humbert's or Pnin's has provided a haven for the homeless imagination of an emigre aristocrat...

...In his later work, however, in the novels he wrote in English, there is a staggering proliferation of artifice?of games, puns, linguistic acrobatics, merging identities, monsters like Humbert Humbert, pathetic grotesques like Timofey Pnin????combined with Nabokov's increasingly virulent distaste for the abominably boring reality that surrounds the artist's enchanted isle...

...No matter how sparkling the trappings of his language, how formidably ingenious the magic of his stratagems and glossy illusions, in the end Nabokov's stark distinction between art and ordinary reality seems disagreeably reductive...

...The quasi-philosophic title is not much help in suggesting Nabokov's purpose...

...For some of the Russians that Nabokov knew in his German years, he can even express an aristocratically fastidious kind of love...

...Even in the idyllic evocation of his childhood country estate in Ada, an irrepressible underlayer of derisive irony can be detected through the gauze of nostalgia...

...For the next six years he shuttled between prison and madhouse, and was finally freed as a privately treated patient (giving Nabokov still another chance to snipe at his pet bete noire, "Freudian voodooism...

...Yet these are very slim pickings...

...But from this the book shifts to the whimsically named Hugh Person, a large and clumsy American who edits novels for a book publisher, lumbering out of a taxi on his fourth visit to Switzerland...

...In Pale Fire, the crazy academic commentator on John Shade's poem, the refugee professor Kin-bote (or, more Slavicly, Botkin) believes that he inspired the poet with his stories about his native Zembla, and the threads of art and exile become inseparably intertwined...

...To be sure, now and again a phrase will catch fire (though only the palest) at the flint of Nabokov's unmistakable extravagance...

...Writers & Writing PALE NABOKOV BY PEARL K. BELL When Vladimir Nabokov's ambitious novel Ada was published three years ago, he told a reporter, with characteristically witty immodesty, "I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine...

...Transparent things, through which the past shines...

...During an earlier trip to confer with a Famous Author, Person had met and married the enchanting half-Belgian, half-Russian Armande, and through some stingy morsels of indirection we learn that a few months after he brought her to New York, Hugh strangled Armande in his (and her) sleep...

...He once wrote to Edmund Wilson: "I do not believe in the old-fashioned, naive, and musty method of human-interest criticism that consists of removing the characters from an author's imaginary world to the . . . world of the critic who then proceeds to examine these displaced characters as if they were 'real' people...

...The bathroom in a third-class Swiss hotel "contained a bidet (ample enough to accommodate a circus elephant, sitting) but no bath...

...This newest Nabokovian plaything, one concludes, is like Oscar Wilde's definition of woman: a sphinx without a secret...

...Still, in that novel the vision is populated with characters who are more than mere satiric appendages to an obsessively disdainful mind...

...The book ends, as unrelentingly oblique as any of its "realistic" episodes, with Person perishing in a hotel fire, perhaps started by his wife's vengeful spectre, and then again perhaps not...

...Certainly Ada, along with the mockingly pedantic Pale Fire that preceded it, attested to the accuracy of his not seriously facetious self-judgment...

...And only Nabokov could have imagined the sexual oddities of the bizarre-minded Armande, who insisted that "they regularly make love around teatime, in the living room, as upon an imaginary stage, to the steady accompaniment of casual small talk, with both performers decently clothed...

...it is also that most depressing of literary miscarriages, a comedy that isn't funny...

...And here we can see the significant difference between Nabokov's fictional scrutiny of the creative process in his earlier work, and in such recent novels as Pale Fire and Ada...

...The same themes, in very different but equally inventive guise, are at the heart of both Lolita and Pnin...

...Even the cackling salvos at Freudian psychiatry seem a listless reflex in Transparent Things...

...The Gift is a young writer's passionate vision of the artist, of the way sensibility reaches for the elegant contrivances of art...

...Now Person has returned to Switzerland in search of Armande's ghost (that transparent thing...

...But when, as in Transparent Things, the palpability of these characters and that world is feeble, when the artist with his arsenal of stylistic trickery suddenly seems trivial and perfunctory, playing his beloved game of Stump the Reader (and winning all too easily since he invents the rules), then other kinds of literary art????even those lumped under the detestable heading "didactic fiction"????become much less dispensable than Nabokov could ever admit...

...Nor is the opening, although it tosses out some familiar Nabokovian notions about the nature of time and memory: "When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object...

...Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment...

...The obstacle of distance that history has placed between him and his homeland heightens his dreamy commitment to his Russian literary heritage...

...Eloquently prankish and slyly exuberant, Ada was a tantalizing mystery whose infinite variety, like Cleopatra's, made hungry where most it satisfied...

...What is Nabokov up to...

...This craft of artifice turns ever more frigid and scornful, tainted oppressively often, as Edmund Wilson noted, by Schadenfreude, a malicious pleasure in manipulative humiliation...

...As Nabokov's language grows in complexity and dazzling brilliance, the sardonic hauteur bares itself more nakedly...

...Ada was a game of quadrilingual Scrabble, science fiction, pastoral romance, incestuous family chronicle, and an elegiac re-creation of the vanished Imperial Russian past...

...And one approaches his brief new novel, Transparent Things (McGraw-Hill, 104 pp., $5.95), with a conditioned frisson of anticipatory delight laced with exasperation????but only to find, with incredulous disappointment, that the chase, for once, has no beast in view, that the puzzle (if there is a puzzle) is not worth pondering or solving...

...One has come to expect in Nabokov's fiction this frustration of richness without satiety, the sort of virtuoso display that made Pale Fire, in Mary McCarthy's words, "a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers...

...The outlandish, grotesquely unidiomatic Timofey Pnin, a gaffe-prone victim of the first rank, can escape the satiric humiliation of his life as a comic misfit among obtuse American academics only in his invulnerably private "paradise of Russian lore" and literature...

...Throughout his magnificently productive writing years, Nabokov has had two great subjects????exile and creativity????that have often merged into a single obsession...

...For the first time in his career, Nabokov has succumbed to the disastrous literary impulse of writing a story without any discernible purpose...

...Not only is Transparent Things tattered and mystifying melodrama...

...This relation between exile and art was crucial to Nabokov's fiction long before his emigration to America in 1940...

...In The Gift, the last and the most moving of the novels he wrote in Russian while living in Berlin in the 1930s, the protagonist is an impoverished young Russian poet, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, who floats in a trance of art through the alien wilderness of the German capital...

...What is going on in the mind of the foxy artificer who once exclaimed "how sweet it . . . [is] to be able to make one's listener thoroughly uncomfortable"????by which he can scarcely have meant boring that listener to death, as he does here...

...Even so superb a stylist cannot hold a reader's attention to his verbal pyrotechnics when they lack an intellectual or even satiric context...

...The decadent European, Humbert Humbert, adrift on American strangeness, finds his salvation at last in the act of writing his memoirs: "I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art...

...As with much of his recent fiction, it was also a gleeful parody of many kinds of literature that Nabokov loathes????particularly "didactic fiction," dismissed by him as either "topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster...