[There are two virtual commonplaces] about the art of Vladimir Nabokov: that it is anti-realistic or anti-mimetic, and therefore a deliberate reproach to the Great Tradition of the nineteenth-century novel; that its major subject is art itself, which makes it a supreme example of what we now call metafiction. (p. 439)

Surely his own books reject the conventions of realism for a deliberate and even exaggerated artifice, an art about different conceptions of art. Such, at least, is the conventional wisdom apparently sanctioned by Nabokov himself.

It will not be my intention to recast Nabokov as a Realist, one of George Eliot's more unlikely descendants, but I do wish to argue that the conventional view of Nabokov's art is misleading in two crucial respects. The first is that it offers a monolithic theory so far as Nabokov's novels are concerned, implying as it does that all of the novels...