Vladimir Nabokov believed in the autonomy of art, but he also struggled mightily to control the material presentation of his books and constrain the interpretive possibilities of their reception. In Nabokov and His Books, Duncan White explores the tension between Nabokov's modernist view of art and his efforts to navigate the literary marketplace. By fleeing first Germany in 1937 and then Paris in 1940 to evade the Nazis, Nabokov experienced a shift in readership from a small émigré Russian circle, through which his anticommercial view of art could be sustained, to a mass market in the United States, through which it could not – at least, not without difficulty. White focusses on Nabokov's difficulty reconciling his aesthetics with the American mass market, and he considers Nabokov's ambivalence toward that market to be representative of late modernist literature.

White argues that Nabokov saw the literary marketplace as both the means by which to ensure his own immortality and a threat to the purity of his artistic vision. His ambivalence had formal consequences for his English novels. Most importantly (in White's view), Nabokov employs devices to encourage the reader to reread his books. In Lolita, for example, the first-time reader cannot appreciate the significance of John Ray Jr.’s reference in the foreword to the death of Mrs. Richard F. Schiller – who, the rereader knows, is the title character. White argues that Nabokov encourages rereading so that his works will be apprehended spatially – that is, as a whole, all at once – because the spatial form of a novel (in theory) transcends the commercialization of its material form. A second formal consequence is thematic: Nabokov's post-Lolita novels, such as Pale Fire, feature anxiety over lost authorial control, reflecting Nabokov's own struggle to maintain control over the presentation and reception of his work after he becomes famous.

Nabokov and His Books is organized into five chapters. In chapter 1, “Contexts,” White proposes to read Nabokov's oeuvre as an example of late modernism, which he defines “as the literary production of modernist work in a period when the field's oppositional power – the specific autonomy of the literary field – has been diluted through its increasing alignment with the fields of social and political power it had initially sought to reject” (31). Chapter 2, “Inspiration,” concerns the historical forces that condition Nabokov's aesthetic principles, especially the autonomy of art. White makes his argument for the formal relevance of these forces to Nabokov's work in chapter 3, “Reading.” Chapter 4, “Publication,” focusses on Nabokov's efforts to control the cover art and blurbs that accompanied his books, and chapter 5, “Legacy,” details Nabokov's attempts to frame his work for posterity.

White's claim that Nabokov's negotiations in the literary marketplace stand at odds with his modernist aesthetic values is insightful and well supported. His definition of late modernism succeeds in situating Nabokov in American literary history as something other than an oddity or transitional figure, though it is not entirely clear how the tension between views of artistic autonomy and market forces that White ascribes to late modernism differs from the experience of Henry James. Moreover, given White's marshalling of a convincing historical context for Nabokov's artistic production, one would have hoped for a larger payoff with respect to interpreting Nabokov's novels. White helps explain why certain formal elements in the novels – the devices that encourage rereading, the thematic concern with authorial control – may be important for Nabokov, but the formal observations themselves are not new. Nabokov and His Books intervenes in the critical debate about the novels themselves in a tangential and supplementary way. For example, White writes in chapter 5, “If we are to take seriously the claim that Lolita is an ethical novel – a claim convincingly made by Brian Boyd, Ellen Pifer, and Leland de la Durantaye, among others – then what goes on the cover, and how complicit the author is in this decision, becomes important” (167). White supplements Boyd, Pifer, and de la Durantaye with his discussion of peritexts, but he does not dissuade us from relegating peritexts themselves to the periphery of the critical debate over Lolita’s ethics.

Nabokov and His Books is an excellent resource for those wanting to better understand the circumstances surrounding the production of Nabokov's novels, but readers should not expect from this study a critical intervention into ongoing debates about formal interpretation.