Vladimir Nabokov, who appreciated artfully layered constructions and perceived all art as a fusion of layers in the time-and-space-defying eyes of the great writer and good reader, would have applauded the publishing of his college lectures in Lectures on Literature—indeed, he planned to publish them himself. Here, if ever, is a book to be experienced on several levels. To begin with, it is a reading of Mansfield Park, Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Swann's Way, Metamorphosis, and Ulysses … by an important novelist who was also an ingenious, albeit highly idiosyncratic critic. It is, next, an evaluation of great—and, in one case, decently minor—novelists by one who was easily the equal of Stevenson, and believed himself the equal of all.

This is, furthermore, a teaching book, and shows us Nabokov the pedagogue, scholar, and annotator, not unlike (in fact, very much like...