SOURCE: “The Problem of Text: Nabokov's Last Two Novels,” in Nabokov's Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on His Life's Work, edited by J. E. Rivers and Charles Nicol, University of Texas Press, 1982, pp. 296-307.

In the following essay, Bruss examines the relation of the narrators to the texts they create in Nabokov's last novels.

Nabokov's last two novels may not measure up to the achievement of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, but both show the deft touch of an artist who knows the intricacy of his craft. The two novels are, to be sure, very different, for while the narrative strategy of Look at the Harlequins! has much in common with the retrospective texture of Ada, Transparent Things lacks that sophisticated, mazelike quality which readers have come to associate with Nabokov's fiction. In his Encounter review of Transparent Things, Jonathan Raban disparaged it as the work of “a...