Word: nabokovian
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This mannered little comedy of bedroom hanky-panky aspires after wickedness-the word Nabokovian is used wistfully in the dust-jacket copy-and achieves naughtiness instead. But that is enough to sustain Author Fay Weldon's fifth novel, one of those lazy summer afternoon collusions in which the writer feels superior to her characters, and the reader smiles at the writer...
...from, I think, Boston." Though Schuyler does not give his name, he is clearly Henry James. The young writer promises to send Schuyler his newly issued first novel (James himself had just published Roderick Hudson) and to live abroad "the sort of life you have led, Mr. Schuyler." Nabokovian mirror-images multiply. Vidal's puppet., Schuyler, prompts James to live abroad; Vidal has since followed James' example. The locale of this meeting is-also clearly-Edgewater; the handsome 1820 Greek Revival mansion on the Hudson River was once owned by the author...
WHAT IS MORE, this beginner likes words even better than people. He is no Russian emigre, but he has a distinctly Nabokovian penchant for treating words like butterflies with a giddy life of their own. His conceits are playful...
...perk up this familiar rehash, Updike gives his clergyman a bag of Nabokovian wordplays and tries to pass him off as Humbert Humbert (in Lolita, Humbert observed, "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style"). Marshfield rattles off alliterations as if he were on death row. He describes a local nursery "which piously kept its Puerto Rican peony-pluckers in a state of purposeful peonage." With nary a blush he writes of returning home to the "fusty forgiveness of my fanlighted foyer." His frequent dissections of sex and theology revolve around a central question: How many...
EDWIN MULLHOUSE by Steven Millhauser. This skillful first novel is both a literary Nabokovian joke-about an 11-year-old who writes the biography of a dead playmate-and an affecting memoir of childhood...