Nabokov's first novel
A stunning debut, a bold new voice
I recently read Mary, Nabokov’s first novel. As I mentioned in a note on this site, it’s not as good as his other novels but still ridiculously good. I think he wrote it when he was 25. He seems to have emerged already a great novelist, the way a horse can walk when it’s born. “He’s a freak,” a friend said when I mentioned this. That’s it. Nabokov makes other good writers, writers you respect and admire, look untalented. They tell you in English class not to use too many adjectives, but Nabokov’s adjectives are the first thing that come to mind about his style, not just apt but often totally unexpected, suddenly turning a phrase 90 degrees and giving the reader a pleasurable whiplash. I think he’s probably a bad influence on most writers: the ones who copy him just copy the fancy style and grand manner but without the passion and end up sounding like aesthetes, literary patissiers. “Passion” isn’t the first word you might associate with Nabokov, but he obviously took an intense and unreproduceable delight in reality, reality and all its mirror versions. He wasn’t Eustace Tilley. There’s not just cleverness but some kind of rage in those energetic sentences, those phrases in which he describes in two incongruous words an experience you had never seen set on paper before and had not known you’d experienced until you read it.
Mary has all of this, it’s all there. The brilliant style, the little games and puzzles, the weird and lively minor characters, even the obsession with reflections. The quality of — “fairy tale” isn’t the right word, it’s too sugary — but some kind of magic which makes you understand that the world in which the book takes place is entirely literary, entirely unreal, even though it may resemble in every detail the one we live in.
If most of his virtues are already on display in his debut, the flaws are different. Nabokov had plenty of them. Even though he dismissed Zola, Mann and Gorky as “novels of ideas,” he couldn’t resist philosophizing and editorializing in his own novels, and these digressions and asides lack charm and add little to the books. Inexcusably, he would sometimes put his opinions about literature into the mouths of his characters, which was especially offputting since these always seemed to be put-downs of some beloved-but-not-quite-first-rate writer like Maupassant. In general, as a critic he was a bully. His tremendous and justifiable self-confidence can make him self-indulgent, especially in his later writing. (I didn’t finish Ada: it was just as brilliant as his other work but too annoying, with its trilingual puns and entomology jokes and excessive adulation for the two main characters.) Mary is pretty much free of all these imperfections. Homophobia and arrogance are the only flaws it shares with his later work. Instead it has other, young-writer flaws. Some sentimentality. Descriptive passages that, while often very good in themselves, seem written for their own sake rather than because they add something to the story. And most glaringly, narcissism. Like many first novels, Mary is autobiographical. The plot concerns a young Russian emigré (Ganin, Vlad’s stand-in) who recalls his first teenage love affair while living hand to mouth in Berlin. If we’re inclined to doubt the real-life basis of the book, we can consult his memoir, Speak, Memory, and recognize the girl and many of the details of their affair (her middle-class background and downy cheeks, the sound of lime trees, etc.) What’s funny is how the fictional Ganin differs from his model. In Mary we can see Nabokov’s glowing self-image. The mysterious young Ganin dominates the seedy rooming house he shares with other hard-luck Russian refugees. All the women are in love with him. Nabokov’s fictional alter ego is tall, strong, brave, suave, and, most shamelessly, a former partisan who fought the Bolsheviks in the civil war. In real life, the author, although dashing enough, if we can go by his pictures, was awkward and rather slight, and (as he describes frankly in his memoir), fantasized about joining the Whites while spending most of the war years living as a playboy. The vanity on display in the novel – he includes loving descriptions of Ganin’s marble-like skin and lustrous eyebrows – is really more funny than anything else, though, and the fact that the hero is a little bit of an asshole probably adds flavor to the story. Mary is, as far as I know, Nabokov’s only truly autobiographical novel, which is itself another impressive, shaming fact about this awesome figure: as a young man, he wrote about himself and then got over it and spent the rest of his career writing about other things. Extraordinary. Can novelists today take a lesson from this? No, I don’t think they can. Just go about your autofictional business. He was a freak: how could you take lessons from him?
Many thanks for this beautiful way with words
If you haven’t read Glory yet, I would recommend that. If you have read it, ignore this message. It’s just that Glory seemed to draw strongly from N’s autobiographical details. But yes, I agree with all you write here, the balanced view of this polarizing writer who personally, I really loved. Reading as many of his works as possible was a necessary stage to go through.