Vladimir Nabokov Writing Style

The last paragraph of The Vane Sisters has its narrator complaining that no message ever reached him. Take the first letter of each word of that paragraph and the message is standing there, sent by two women who died earlier in the story. He does not see it, and the story declines to point. Nabokov composed for the rereader, so a first pass through his books is the bait and the second is where the evidence has been sitting all along.

Pale Fire shows the construction most plainly. A dead poet leaves a 999-line poem, and his neighbor Charles Kinbote annotates it into the story of an exiled king of Zembla, a country the poem does not mention. The poem is the control. Kinbote's delusion can be checked against it line by line, which is what Wayne Booth meant when he defined an unreliable narrator as one who departs from the norms of the work rather than one who lies.

The sentences run the same double errand. Humbert Humbert opens Lolita with a firework of l and t sounds, then supplies his own review of the performance, that a murderer can be counted on for a fancy prose style. Charm is the alibi. Nabokov told his students to caress the details, the divine details, and he built his own books so that a detail you enjoyed early gives evidence against somebody late.

His critics are more useful here than his admirers. Ursula K. Le Guin found the prose hard to get through because it keeps stopping to be admired. James Wood complains that the novels turn into propaganda on behalf of good noticing. Charles Baxter, who loves the bubblegum rhyme in Lolita, says the symmetries of Pale Fire and Ada can leave a reader feeling graded, more like final exams than novels. Those three objections mark the exact places where the machine seizes. That makes them the part worth studying.

The Signature Only a Reread Finds

A buried fact has to do honest work on the surface first. The acrostic in The Vane Sisters is the extreme case of the burial, and the ordinary case is a detail that behaves like scenery for most of a novel. Both obey the same rule. When the hidden thing is doing nothing in its own scene, an alert reader hears the author breathing behind it and starts reading for the trick instead of the story. Test a plant by deleting its payoff. If the early scene still works with nothing to pay off, the plant is safe to keep.

The Object That Cannot Lie

Put something in the book that cannot lie. Shade's poem, John Ray's foreword, the trial Humbert is writing toward: each one is a fixed surface, and a narrator's distortions become visible the moment they scrape against it. Without that surface a distorted voice reads as authorial confusion, which is the diagnosis Booth handed to a century of argument about the governess in The Turn of the Screw. The object does not have to be large. A letter, a photograph, a school report, anything a reader can hold still while the voice keeps moving.

The Exact Word as a Claim of Ownership

He held that a line of prose should be as unchangeable as a line of verse, and he enforced that on other people's translators, restoring Emma Bovary's mistranslated hairdo and Gregor Samsa's misidentified beetle in front of the class. Kundera turned the same instinct into a rule after Nabokov pointed out that the word house appears eight times in six sentences at the opening of Anna Karenina, and that the repetition is deliberate. Synonyms are what a nervous writer reaches for. The exact word costs you a trip back to the thing itself, which is why his precision reads as authority instead of vocabulary.

The Rhyme You Half Hear

Lolita's bubblegum returns at the end of the novel as the pink bubble forming on Quilty's lips while he dies, and Baxter, who found the echo, notes that the image has grown up and turned bloody in the interval. The distance between the two is doing the work. An echo lands when a reader has half forgotten the first instance. It curdles when the gap is short enough to look like a device. Baxter's rule for this is blunt, that a flat rhyme is worse than no rhyme at all. Lay the first instance where it has an errand of its own, then wait longer than feels safe.

Charm as Anesthetic

Humbert is funny about his own diction, apologetic about his handwriting, generous about Charlotte Haze's taste in furniture, and murderous. The comedy is doing anesthetic work on the reader. Nabokov gives the worst man in the book the best sentences, which forces you to notice how fast style buys consent, and that noticing is the moral engine of the novel rather than any position it states. A gentler narrator would have made the book safe to read. The technique fails the moment the charm is performed at a reader instead of sprung on them, because a reader who feels flattered has stopped being implicated.

Composition in Movable Pieces

He drafted on index cards, out of order, and claimed the finished book was present whole at the moment of conception, so that writing became transcription of something that had no sequence in his head. Treat the second half of that claim as a working posture rather than a fact about genius. The cards are the usable part. They keep the order of disclosure editable after the prose is already good, and that is the one revision move most drafts cannot perform, because their scenes are welded to the file they live in. Read the sequence for what a reader knows at each point instead of what happens, and two scenes will ask to trade places.

Unreliable Narration Against a Fixed Point

Booth's definition is narrower than the phrase suggests. A narrator is unreliable when he departs from the norms of the work, which is a different thing from telling lies. Nabokov hands you those norms as an object you can hold. Pale Fire supplies Shade's poem, so Kinbote can be checked against 999 lines that refuse to bend, and Lolita supplies John Ray's foreword, which reports a death in childbirth under a married name you have no reason to recognize on a first reading. The device buys him one voice for a whole book while a second story runs underneath, which is work a neutral narrator cannot do without stopping to explain.

Thematic Line, the Tune in a Fugue

Theme, in his own working definition, is an image or an idea repeated through a book as a tune reoccurs in a fugue. He demonstrated it on other writers before he was caught doing it himself. Through Madame Bovary he traced a layer theme, from Charles's absurd tiered schoolboy cap to the tiered wedding cake to the three nested coffins, one shape rhyming a whole wasted life. Through Bleak House he followed Miss Flite's caged birds until their bars fall across the entire novel. A first-time reader of his own books senses an order and cannot name it, and a rereader can point straight at it. That gap is the effect.

The Apparatus Narrates

Foreword, commentary, index. The scholarly furniture around a text is where he hides the second story. Pale Fire is the extreme case, since the index belongs to Kinbote and can be read as a plot of its own, with entries that quarrel with the poem they claim to serve. Borges reached the same instrument from the other direction by reviewing books that did not exist, and between them they make the apparatus do what a second narrator would otherwise have to do. A reader who skips the front matter loses half the book. That is the cost, and the gain is that the machinery can lie in a voice the story does not use.

Naming the Object Last

Shklovsky asked writers to describe a familiar thing as though it had no name yet. Nabokov's nutcracker in Pnin arrives as a leggy thing rather than a nutcracker, which is what a hand registers before the mind files it. The formalists loved that sentence as proof that fiction is a closed machine with no duty to the world, and Wood reads the same sentence as fidelity to the way perception arrives, late and out of order and named only once the body has already reacted to the shape in the hand. Both readings are useful at a desk. Naming the object last keeps a reader inside a body instead of hovering above the scene, and it costs nothing except patience with word order.

Lifting the ornament and calling it style

The objection Le Guin raised is plain enough, that this prose is hard to get through because it keeps stopping to be admired. She is describing a real failure state. Imitators land in it first. The Lolita paragraphs everybody quotes are load-bearing, since the litany of the girl's names is a man sorting a person into versions he can own, and the alliteration is that same man enjoying his own mouth in front of a jury. Take the surface off and you have decoration with nothing underneath. Test an ornate sentence by asking what it costs the character to say it, then cut the ones that cost nothing.

Symmetry pursued for its own sake

Baxter loves the bubblegum rhyme and still complains that Pale Fire and Ada gently close out much of the world, that their patterning can leave a reader feeling graded. That is the overcorrection waiting for anybody who learns the trick and enjoys it too much. Symmetry is not beauty. The bars on a jail are symmetrical. When each element answers another element, the book becomes a room without a window, and the reader stops following the story to start scanning for the pairs. Keep one thread that pays off nothing at all. An unresolved detail is what tells a reader that the world of the book is larger than its design, and that some of it was there before the author arrived.

Noticing performed at the reader

Wood's charge is that the fiction keeps turning into propaganda on behalf of good noticing, and a quarrel over a cigar is his evidence. Henry James wrote a red cigar tip, Nabokov objected that cigars have no tips and that James had not looked hard enough, and Wood answers that cigars do have tips and that no writer owes every cigar the full treatment. Copy the noticing without the reason for it. You get a page where the furniture is more alert than the people. Detail is expensive. Spend it where a mind is deciding something, and let the rest of the room stay unremarkable.

Unreliability with nothing to check it against

Wood's term for the famous distorting narrators is reliably unreliable, meaning the author quietly flags the distortion so a reader can measure it. Nabokov flags constantly. Kinbote's index, Humbert's arithmetic with dates, the small factual snags in both books sit where an attentive reader can catch them, and catching one is the pleasure that carries a reader through several hundred pages of a voice they would otherwise have no reason to keep listening to. Pull the flags out and you have a narrator who is merely wrong, which reads as sloppiness for two hundred pages and then as a cheat. Unreliable narration is a contract, and the author signs it on the first page.