Nabokov Studies

Nabokov Studies, 2 (1995), 301-03. BOOK REVIEWS David Rampton. Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993. 143 pp. David Rampton's new book on Nabokov appears in the Modern Novelists series which, though published in New York and covering an international array of figures, seems to take a generally British view of the genre. Thus half of the almost fifty published or forthcoming titles deal with authors associated with the British Isles. In such acontext it is perhaps revealing that this study can assume that only part of its audience will be "devotees of American fiction" (79). Rampton , of course, is well-known among the readers of this journal for the monograph Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), which carefully illuminated some neglected social, historical, and political issues in Nabokov's fiction. This less specialized study offers a broad overview suitable for college-level literature majors, but on occasion it also provides Nabokov scholars with food for thought. As an introduction, Rampton's book has several virtues. With an eye on the probable audience, it gives special attention to i.o//ta as the starting point for most of Nabokov's first-time readers. But in stressing how this novel embodies the "Morality of the Aesthete," Rampton neatly sidesteps the charge of reductive aestheticism so often leveled against Nabokov, especially in British critical discourse. Moreover, in the process of giving clear, step-by-step discussions of most of Nabokov's novels, he groups them in well-chosen categories that can easily be linked with major trends throughout modern fiction, such as fictional autobiography , psychological exploration, or experimentalism. Rampton also brings Nabokov's forewords and afterwords explicitly into the discussion, thereby avoiding the pitfalls either of accepting Nabokov at his own valuation or of leaving the reader hanging between the critic's argument and the author's strong opinion. Finally , because Rampton has been able to take Brian Boyd's biography into account , he can set Nabokov's career in clearer perspective than was previously possible in a book of this kind. Nabokov scholars will be especially interested in Rampton's sense of the major transitions and high points in Nabokov's career. After stressing the periodic importance of autobiographical fiction during the twenties and thirties (Mary, Glory, The Gift), he turns to four studies of psychological obsession running from The Defense , through The Eye and Laughter in the Dark, to Despair. This approach has the merit of providing a clear genealogy for Lolita as a fictitious autobiography written by an obsessive personality, but it slights the later development of Nabokov's autobiographical impulse. In fact, there is nothing of substance on Speak, Memory, perhaps because the series requires an exclusive emphasis on the novel. Still, these two chapters do reveal Rampton's special knowledge of things British as they pertain to Nabokov: thus he compares Herman in Despair to "one of Browning's murderous monologists" (52), or cites enlightening critical comments by G. K. Chesterton (31 ), Stuart Hampshire (38), and A. D. Nuttall (51 ). 302 Nabokov Studies Rampton then posits an experimental phase that runs from Invitation to a Beheading to Nabokov's early English fiction, including not just the predictable Bend Sinister but also SebastÃ-an Knight. It is implied, though not explicitly presented as a thesis, that the key to Nabokov's experimentalism in these novels and also in later ones lies in his deliberate cultivation both of a multiplicity of possible interpretations and of a final situation of indeterminacy. These goals bring him close to Kafka, though Rampton is careful to stress the temperamental differences between the two writers, as well as Nabokov's strong disclaimer of influence. No Nabokovian will be surprised by Rampton's decision to omit King, Queen, Knave from his book, but a more serious gap comes with Pnin, which is dismissed as one of "Nabokov's more straightforward novels" (6). Yet apart from the valuable work by Barabtarlo, Nicol, and Toker that disputes this point, for years an excerpt from Pnin in the Norton Anthology has represented the introduction to Nabokov in standard surveys of American literature. For Rampton, however, Lolita alone...