As he says in a taped interview about Lolita, in response to queries about the novel’s “ideas” (which, by the way, turned him off, hence the intellectual dearth in much of his writing), “I don’t want to touch hearts I don’t even want to touch minds. Ironically, many readers praise Nabokov for all these faults, since Nabokov himself was in love with tedium and closed to new ideas, bragging that his ideal editor would only rework a misplaced semicolon, or apologetically suggest a nipped comma, and nothing else. After all, his books - I’m thinking of the autobiography, Pale Fire, and Lolita in particular - are awash in pointless details, overlong scenes, and the occasional cliché. At a bit over 100 pages, it’s a short book, and this really works to Nabokov’s advantage. Mary, a solid first novel, presages all that’s good and bad with Vladimir Nabokov’s career.
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