PALE FIRE (315 pp.)—Vladimir Nabokov—Putnam ($5).
Desperate Russian critics, trying hard to pigeonhole my own novels, have once or twice linked me up with Gogol, but when they looked again I had untied the knots and the box was empty.
— Vladimir Nabokov
No critic, Russian or not, has yet been able to lock Vladimir Nabokov in a box, except for the clumsily made critical box labeled "cleverness" — a confinement not really confining, since cleverness implies an ability to get out of boxes. Still, by general acknowledgment, Nabokov is the cleverest author to write in Russian in the last few decades, and probably the cleverest in English since James Joyce, despite the fact that English is his third language.
But winning acknowledgment as the cleverest writer is a touchy business, a little like becoming Pope — one must not campaign for the election. Readers of Nabokov's new book, which is surely the most eccentric novel published in this decade, have considerable reason to feel that the author is campaigning. Pale Fire, like Lolita, is a monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work whose verbal agility is often bewildering. But unlike the earlier book, Pale Fire does not really cohere as a satire; good as it is, the novel in the end seems to be mostly an exercise in agility — or perhaps in bewilderment.
At the book's core is a long, sober meditation in rhymed couplets by the late and highly respected poet John Shade.
Surrounding it is a dense, many-layered rind of preface, commentary and index, compiled by a scholarly ass named Charles Kinbote. This obtuse fellow imagines himself to have been a great friend of Shade's. Actually, as is absurdly and delightfully evident after a few pages, Kinbote knew the old poet for only a few months, and their friendship consisted of bare toleration on Shade's side.
Thurgus the Turgid. Nabokov, of course, does this sort of turn spectacularly well. Solemnly the lardwit betrays himself, reporting that Shade's friendship "was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed." But as the reader reads Kinbote's line-by-line commentary on the poem, he sees that the annotator is afflicted with something more than boobery. Sanely or not, Kinbote has it firmly in his head that he is the deposed king of "a distant northern land" called Zembla, and that he was known to his adoring subjects as Charles the Beloved, son of Alfin the Vague, grandson of Thurgus the Turgid.
It begins to be clear that Kinbote hoped to get Shade to make an epic of Charles the Beloved's decline and fall.
Whenever he could get Shade's ear, he filled it with the romance of Zembla. But the poem, when it appears, is a sad, thoughtful intimation of mortality 999 lines long, focused loosely around the suicide of Shade's 23-year-old ugly-duckling daughter.
Here Nabokov becomes more poet than stuntman; the elegy Pale Fire has a lean grace and clarity of emotion worthy of a writer who is ranked, as Shade is supposed to be, only a step behind Robert Frost.
Its lyrical first stanza, in which Shade as a boy gazes at reflections in a window, is one of the best: I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.