SOURCE: "Novelist at Large," in The New York Times Book Review, February 27, 1994, p. 17.

In the following review, Prose lauds Visiting Mrs. Nabokov as light, unoffensive, and lively.

Written for British newspapers like The Observer and American magazines like Vanity Fair, and as an apparently welcome respite from writing fiction, the articles in Martin Amis's latest collection of essays have the range and appealing ragbag variety of work done on assignment. Indeed, as he writes in the introduction to Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions, the only thing that unites these pieces is "getting out of the house."

In his forays away from his desk, Mr. Amis goes to China with a rowdy British soccer team whose patron and mascot is Elton John; he talks to Salman Rushdie in hiding, interviews Graham Greene in Paris and, in "one of the pillared public rooms of the Montreux Palace Hotel," visits...