The difficulty of assessing Nabokov's achievement as a novelist writing about people obviously derives from the flagrantly artificial quality of his fiction…. The Nabokovian universe, we all know, is a construct of words, taking life from the page and pen of its author. Self-conscious artifice intrudes on the reader's awareness, signaling the discontinuities between Nabokov's fabricated worlds and the one we call our own…. The continuous word-play, allusions, self-conscious references, and authorial intrusions all serve to interrupt the reader's sympathetic participation in the author's illusory world. In this way, Nabokov alerts us to the fictional status of his literary landscape; he impels us to recognize that all the apparent depth and dimension we perceive in this "picture in a picture" are achieved aesthetic effects. (pp. 4-5)

The most familiar assumption is that Nabokov's "lush verbal jungle" (as one distinguished critic recently wrote) is an obvious manifestation of the...