Using the writer's first English-language novel as a case study and a springboard, Priscilla Meyer's Nabokov and Indeterminacy formulates a holistic vision of his legacy. In doing so, it legitimizes a common—for many instinctive—response to him: if we realize that “we can never exhaust” (56) his mature works by interpreting them, it is because by design they “model the infinite inscrutability of existence” (150). Nabokov and Indeterminacy eschews dated and lazy classifications of him as one postmodernist among many. Apart from an erudition in English, French, and Russian letters unrivaled in facile comparativist delineations of Vladimir Nabokov's alleged postmodernism, the originality of Meyer's approach lies in her ability to orient his individual mastery of a “determined use of subtext” against “the postmodern concept of bricolage and the nature of indeterminacy” (3). A series of subtextual analyses becomes “a method of inquiry into Nabokov's narrative system” (17), which crescendos into a conclusion that Nabokov's brand of indeterminacy implies “a distinct personal authorial presence that guides our shared investigation of an urgent question, whose answer can never be known in this life: is there a life after death?” (147). Those puzzled and irked by what they see as Nabokov's teetering on the brink of grand revelations should look no further: exegetically sophisticated and metaphysically informed, Meyer's study has everything they need to be confirmed in what they suspect has been true all along: for the writer who states that “style is matter” the quest is the goal.
Those disinclined to accept such a denouement—or those looking for a monograph on The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which it is not (3)—would be remiss to put the book aside. The trouble-free way to enjoy Nabokov and Indeterminacy—and benefit from it—is to focus on Meyer's explication of the autobiographic substratum of such diverse works as Pale Fire (see her scholium on Charles Kinbote's “Russian” fears, 142–45) and Speak, Memory. Her integration of a programmatic, yet understudied, “An Evening of Russian Poetry,” into a larger context formed by Pnin, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory is both masterful and timely as a demonstration of how much we stand to gain by approaching familiar destinations via less-travelled roads. In that sense it reminds one what Nabokov studies used to be like in the days when dissertations took longer to morph into publications, before a proliferation of books premised on predictable approaches, immediately accessible materials, and illustrating superficial parallels.
This is not to say that the book will disappoint the polemically inclined.
When does an academic inquiry into indeterminacy begin to follow an all too determined, all too narrow path? With The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire in its crosshairs and plenty of implications for the entire canon, this study may be said to echo that Nabokovian character who queries: “don't you think” that “practically in all his novels he” tries “to express the fantastic recurrence of certain situations?” Metaliterary trickery aside, what is the price of our newly gained ability to distill a writer's body of work into a pithy definition of the ambition that guides it? What if the subtextual significance of a rare Russian term vypolzina, by way of Nabokov's aborted attempt to Russianize Hamlet, leads us nowhere else but to Aleksandr Pushkin's accidental prophecy recorded by Vladimir Dal΄; what if the overlooked absence of a knight from John Keats's “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” as Nabokov knew it permits us to catch a glimpse of literary determinism in action?
To accept that Nabokov “creates wormholes…that make it impossible to determine what has…occurred in the apparently obvious plot line” (123) is to admit that that guiding light of so many affirmative elucidations of this writer's thought, his promise of “a synthesis of poignant artistic delight” (Speak, Memory), is a joke. Surprisingly, however, at this juncture Meyer demurs from engaging interpretations her reading implicitly challenges. Brian Boyd's Nabokov's “ Pale Fire”: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, with its determined explication of one instance of poignant synthesis is mentioned yet bypassed, missing a chance to respond to Boyd's counterargument to Meyer's own pathbreaking Find What the Sailor Has Hidden: Vladimir Nabokov's “ Pale Fire” (1988).
Circular, not spiral-like, in its logic, Meyer's Nabokov and Indeterminacy explores and quite possibly exhausts the potential of a persistent and influential response to this writer. As such, and as a compendium of stimulating close readings and enlightening observations, this book is here to stay.
