Volume 42, Number 15 · October 5, 1995
Nabokov's Dark Treasures
By John Banville
The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
by Michael Wood
Princeton University Press, 252 pp., $24.95
The Magician's Doubts, Michael Wood declares, 'is a book about Nabokov's words and how they are arranged.' One can almost hear the old magician himself purring his approval as he looks down from Ardis or Ardor, or whatever paradise it is that he inhabits. By the close of the book, however, its subject's eyebrows are liable to have risen, like those of the startled reader Humbert Humbert pictured, to the back of his nobly domed bald head. Michael Wood seems to me the ideal Nabokov critic—perceptive, scrupulous, elegant, well-read, witty—but I am not sure that Nabokov would have agreed. For a start, Wood does not always accept Nabokov's version of Nabokov, a reserved sin in the Nabokovian creed: also, he dives more deeply into the work, and comes up with more dark treasures, than its secretive and obsessively evasive author would have wished. Further, he ventures into forbidden waters, exploring, for instance, questions of morality and ethics. The ethical
Review, 3304 words
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