Alexander Spektor's thoughtful and beautifully written book adopts as its point of departure the core assumption of the growing scholarly field of “Narrative Ethics”: that literary works create the space for ethical engagement among the figures of implied author, fictional character, and reader, an engagement in which the moral imagination of the latter is activated through ethically charged—indeed, often ethically ambiguous—acts of narrative representation. The book's sophisticated analysis draws attention to the varied ways in which literary texts ask their readers to become conscious of, take responsibility for, and adopt a stance toward the sorts of power relations that are inevitably involved in the formal conditions for the possibility of storytelling. At stake, one might say, is not so much the ethics of content, as the ethics of form.

The book draws its case studies from the work of Fedor Dostoevskii and Vladimir Nabokov, two novelists, whose names are irreversibly bound to each other ever since the latter's scathing and perhaps improvidently ardent remarks on his predecessor's artistic failings. Although much scholarly attention has been dedicated to the pair, Spektor's theoretical framework enables him to contribute an innovative account of the convergences and differences at play. In his reading, the two corpuses present us with texts that contribute to the formation of the reader’s ethical subjectivity by foregrounding the ethical stakes of representation: the hierarchies of power distributed among authors, readers and characters; the responsibilities inherent in authoring and reading alike; the relationship between language and violence; between the desire to tell stories and the urge to dominate. Of course, the two authors do so very differently. The “Christ-intoxicated” realist stages the exercise of “authorial silence” (177) vis-à-vis characters, who are thus given over to dialogic struggle for domination, issuing either in physical violence or in (silent) forgiveness. “In Dostoevsky's world,” Spektor writes, “to have faith is to begin the hard work of forgiving oneself. Since forgiveness represents a redemptive internalizing of one's relationship with Christ, faith renders the endless external dialogic engagement with others obsolete” (81). Nabokov translates something like this very logic from the language of metaphysics to that, more explicitly, of aesthetics. At stake here is the mirroring relationship between the implied author and the author-like (or imposter-author) protagonist, whose desire for total mastery and metaphysical certainty manifests itself paradigmatically in acts of violence. The dialectical relationship between the implied author and the protagonist transpires as a kind of unity-in-opposition; the author is utterly unlike his mad hero insofar as he is positioned outside the diegetic universe of the tale and yet also like him insofar as he shares the (violent) impulse of total aesthetic control (178).

The four central chapters of the book supply readings of Dostoevskii's and Nabokov's fictional works—focusing on Dostoevskii's “The Meek One” (1876) and The Idiot (1869), and Nabokov's Despair (1937) and Bend Sinister (1947), respectively—each highlighting the textual strategies involved in interpolating readers, soliciting their ethical responses to the diegetic and para-diegetic (implicit-authorial) dynamics of the text. Thus, readers of “The Meek One” are asked to recognize their complicity in perpetuating the “narrative cycle” that issues in the heroine's suicide (81). The Idiot, in turn, places the reader in the uncomfortable predicament of having to choose between violence-ridden “understanding” and helpless failure to understand, between consciousness and goodness (98–99). Nabokov's Despair thematizes the perils of identity in narrative and life, and demands that the reader accept responsibility “for the potential violence in any aesthetic act” (138). Bend Sinister opens the space for questioning aesthetic pleasure itself, insofar as it is inevitably haunted by the double of political mastery and oppression (168).

Spektor's book contains a great many insights and thought-provoking formulations—among them an innovative analysis of Mikhail Bakhtin's ethics of dialogue and plot, local engagements with the scholarly traditions, and astute readings of literary texts; I regret not being able to do them all justice within the scope of this review. In conclusion, I would like only to point toward a horizon the book knowingly sets aside, namely, the socio-historical conditions within which specifically such a configuration of ethics and aesthetics would tend to arise. Bakhtin himself suggests one way in which such a historical condition might be characterized when he speaks of Dostoevsky's struggle (both thematic and formal) against the “reification of man, of human relations, of all human values under the conditions of capitalism” (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 1963, 62). The historiological concept of reification would perhaps afford us one way to conjugate Dostoevskii's worries about discursive finalization with Nabokov's paradoxes of artistic autonomy against the background of a social formation increasingly segmented and dominated by instrumental reason. Such socio-historical considerations aside, Spektor's book contributes an impressive range of theoretical and critical insight to scholarly discussions of literary form. It also seems to me especially well-suited for teaching within the liberal arts framework, insofar as the latter is called upon to stimulate the students’ ethical and critical attunement to meaning-making practices in the social world.