The problem with writing book reviews on Nabokov is this: Nabokov hates all book reviewers and is not afraid to make this known, whether through interviews, academic lectures, or even the themes of his own books (Pale Fire). To review a Nabokov book is to take on the master at his own game, to attempt--and this is true of all book reviews, however strident the claim to objectivity--to express the essence of a literary work in many fewer words than the original work, to become in some ways a substitute for the original work, at best a pointer to the work.
In other words, the job of a reviewer is to reduce the work, ideally to essences, but necessarily at the expense of details: the "divine details" that, according to Nabokov, comprise the true life of a book.
However, the early (Russian-original) Nabokov is an easier target for review than the later (English, inscrutable) Nabokov, mostly because Nabokov's aims over the course of his career became in one way broader, in another way more terrifyingly simple and direct. By his last book, Look At The Harlequins!, Nabokov is producing literature for which any sort of exegesis would actually be superfluous: the meaning of the later Nabokov is just the meaning of the words on the page (and the hidden organization of the words on the page), and nothing besides. Whereas the early Nabokov was, by Nabokov's own later-life standards, an imperfect author: incapable, to some degree, to resist the youthful temptation of having ideas. Nabokov's early works are far less resistant to the reduction necessary for talking about the book at all--without simply presenting the book as its own irreducible argument.
However, the early (Russian-original) Nabokov is an easier target for review than the later (English, inscrutable) Nabokov, mostly because Nabokov's aims over the course of his career became in one way broader, in another way more terrifyingly simple and direct. By his last book, Look At The Harlequins!, Nabokov is producing literature for which any sort of exegesis would actually be superfluous: the meaning of the later Nabokov is just the meaning of the words on the page (and the hidden organization of the words on the page), and nothing besides. Whereas the early Nabokov was, by Nabokov's own later-life standards, an imperfect author: incapable, to some degree, to resist the youthful temptation of having ideas. Nabokov's early works are far less resistant to the reduction necessary for talking about the book at all--without simply presenting the book as its own irreducible argument.
So What About The Defense?
The Defense is nearly one such early-Nabokov work. The plot of the book revolves around Luzhin, a chess prodigy and obsessive, brilliant in terms of the game but ill-equipped for the complexities of life. Of course, as the book goes on, Luzhin is faced with a number of such complexities: unscrupulous management, financial ruin, the affections of a woman who wants to free him from his own mental enclosures--his defenses. The book's tension comes from this arrangement of Luzhin against the world, of genius against society, whether non-comprehending, exploitative or simply numb.
Genius against society is not an isolated theme for Nabokov: it informs the conflict, or at least the structure, of much of his work and many of his protagonists (Humbert Humbert, John Shade, Van Veen, Cinncinnatus C.) However, with The Defense, what normally makes Nabokov's work powerful becomes a liability due to one crucial decision made about the book's construction.
The Defense is nearly one such early-Nabokov work. The plot of the book revolves around Luzhin, a chess prodigy and obsessive, brilliant in terms of the game but ill-equipped for the complexities of life. Of course, as the book goes on, Luzhin is faced with a number of such complexities: unscrupulous management, financial ruin, the affections of a woman who wants to free him from his own mental enclosures--his defenses. The book's tension comes from this arrangement of Luzhin against the world, of genius against society, whether non-comprehending, exploitative or simply numb.
Genius against society is not an isolated theme for Nabokov: it informs the conflict, or at least the structure, of much of his work and many of his protagonists (Humbert Humbert, John Shade, Van Veen, Cinncinnatus C.) However, with The Defense, what normally makes Nabokov's work powerful becomes a liability due to one crucial decision made about the book's construction.
In Nabokov's more effective work, the geniuses are either allowed to speak for themselves, or we as readers are invited (with whatever mischievous or malicious intent on Nabokov's part) to sympathize with them: Humbert narrates his own story, Shade is given 999 lines of rebuttal against his co-narrator and reviewer Kinbote's distortions, Cinncinnatus C. is a prisoner of arbitrary forces and thus automatically someone with whom any reader engrossed in a book can identify with. What works about these books is that we believe in the purity of the genius character's views, we're forced to identify with their superior understanding of their fictive worlds. And, because this strong tendency toward reader identification exists, Nabokov can play with us. He can give us Humbert, someone with whom we must identify yet at the same time someone with whom we can't allow ourselves to sympathize, and he can give us Shade, who despite his minimal presence in first-person causes us to feel outrage and horror at Kinbote's total inability to comprehend what we, ourselves, think we comprehend about Shade. Allowing the geniuses to speak for themselves thus gives Nabokov the motor of some of his strongest books. It lets Nabokov hijack the mechanics of sympathy that, in his lectures, he explicitly disavows.
Luzhin, however, is not given this opportunity. We are privy to his thoughts, yes: we see him baffled by the emotions of those around him; we see him slip further and further into his addiction to his problem of perfect chess defense, unconscious of its addictive nature. But the key word here is "addiction": The Defense is a novel about a genius's addiction to the workings of his own genius. As such, in order for the book to have any pathos at all, we must not be allowed to sympathize too closely with Luzhin. We have to view him objectively, as the third-person narration views him objectively, as a subject, at least in some measure, for pity rather than identification.
In another writer, this might be the recipe for a powerful book (Balzac's Lost Illusions, for one, works along similar lines.) But Nabokov is not another writer, and thus The Defense has an overpowering sense of emptiness at its core. There's a sense that Nabokov, in relying on merely empathy and emotion to drive his plot (rather than empathy and emotion, plus its subversion), is not fully at home: that something is missing from The Defense. Imagine The Defense written according to the logic of Lolita: rather that a suffering Luzhin, held up as an object for our speculation, a Luzhin presented as directly as Humbert was later presented to us, a Luzhin who we only realize is slipping away from our ability to consciously identify ourselves with him when it's already too late.
In another writer, this might be the recipe for a powerful book (Balzac's Lost Illusions, for one, works along similar lines.) But Nabokov is not another writer, and thus The Defense has an overpowering sense of emptiness at its core. There's a sense that Nabokov, in relying on merely empathy and emotion to drive his plot (rather than empathy and emotion, plus its subversion), is not fully at home: that something is missing from The Defense. Imagine The Defense written according to the logic of Lolita: rather that a suffering Luzhin, held up as an object for our speculation, a Luzhin presented as directly as Humbert was later presented to us, a Luzhin who we only realize is slipping away from our ability to consciously identify ourselves with him when it's already too late.
