Maloff outlines a few parallels, such as the similarities between Vladimir Vladimirovitch Nabokov and Vadim Vadimovitch, both bom in St. Petersburg
in 1899, their childhood developped in similar circumstances, was educated at Cambridge, gained fame as emigré writers and moved to the US. Both also taught at Cornell (in LATH, Quirn University), made a transition from Russian to English... and, warns Maloff, to English or "a language that misleadingly looks like English but is in essence quite wholly created and one of the world's authentic miracles—"the fata-morganic prose I had willed into being in the
desert of exile") and both became celebrated novelists. For Marloff "between, beyond and beneath the discernible lines to his own life, Nabokov imagines a correlative life and an imagination resembling but at a remove from his own—invents, that is, a life that he might have lived and a semblance of the  imagination that absorbs from that life the materials of his art. All of it he has transcribed in the forms, language and imagined processes by which dreamed life and suffered experience— from the glow of a lovely girl's skin and the set of her chin, the down of her forearm to the familiar Nabokovian confusions of time and duration, space and direction, memory and image, as well as his nightmares and waking dreams, the symptoms of a recurring "madness" and other fantasms of the mind, the processes by which the real and the illusory life are re-created into Vadim's/Vladimir's fictions... A man who's not sure of his name and must find the coordinates of his existence somewhere, even if he must invent them, or discover them in the iridescence of a butterfly, or in the rigors of art."

 

For Maloff "Nabokov's narratives unravel deep within the texture of his work, and serve as reference points for the mind while the eye is transfixed by the whirling sleight-of-hand; Russia, England, France, America; three or four successive wives; the fitful, hectic processes of creation. Iris, lyric love of his young manhood and first of his wives, is killed by her mad, thwarted lover. Annette, first Vadim's inept typist, then his inept wife, and between these states the occasion or object of a small masterpiece of a defloration scene, disappears with a lady friend who may or may not have designs on her—but not before producing a daughter for him. That he has in the barren chill of their marriage sought the brief consoiation of a lascivious graduate student is the pretext but not the cause of her departure. Louise, number three, the wicked stepmother and something of a tramp, vanishes with some lover or other to Florida or
Florence or somewhere else—leaving Vadim, as the others have, to his lonely devices and his consuming art, all of them become memory for the old writer, lost in time and recoverable only through the endless re-creation of his fluid self."

 

"The daughter, Bel, his Annabel Lee, his Lolita and melancholy inspiration for that novel (as written by Vadim more evocatively, suggestively entitled
A Kingdom By the Sea), his captive, enchanted princess denied him by Annette throughout her childhood and forever after by that vilest of despoliators, another man, in fact her husband — Bel is granted him only for the butterfly years of her pubescence following Annette's violent, happy death." The protagonist's years with Bel, "give rise to the tenderest, loveliest, saddest fata-morganic prose in the novel: the two of them alone in their kingdom by the sea, two beautiful children, father and daughter, tremblingly innocent, delicately sexlessly lewd lovers, joyously free during that brief reprieve to ramble the 'intelligent' trails of the far mountains inhabited only by other butterflies and a magical, wondrous landscape out of time. Not of flesh and the world but of the state of 'being in love': Nabokov is the incomparable master of that trance, and here it is reserved only for the brief doomed period when he is first enamored of Iris—and for Bel, for the gift of time between childhood and adolescence, for her incipience, before they are awakened from their dream and exiled from their kingdom. Then the corruptors appear..."

 

The novel offers glimpses of this story "through the distortions of memory,while we are mesmerized by the dazzling,blinding, multifaceted surface."

Another trait shared by Vadim and Vladimir is their view of art as "performance, a masque, a circus, a trapeze act conducted — as he says of his shift from Russian to English—'without net.' A matter of life and death, sanity and madness, every step is dangerous. One wants simply to record those steps--those figures and figurations-- and regard them rapt with admiration, as in a brief paragraph, a sentence, a phrase Nabokov turns and circles, spins and whirls with arrogant perfection, superb mastery." For Maloff, "if novels were composed of marvelous sentences Nabokov would surely have to be judged the greatest
living writer; and it is certain he would be some kind of great writer if he were writing travel brochures, field guides to lepidoptery, technical manuals for the
automotive industry. But novels are not composed of beautiful sentences. Occasionally...we long for a huge, lumbering, sweating, grunting workhorse of a
sentence that will ploddingly perform the brute labor of bearing its terrible,necessary burden from here to there.But of course getting "there" is not the
point of Vadim's novel; the point lies in the elaboration of fantastic, fugual designs,gorgeous patterns and textures,all with contemptuous grace and  virtuosity. Such art is in the essence and by disdainful intention decadent..."

 

Marloff considers Nabokov "our great decadent, our reigning mandarin and eccentric, a supreme, determinedly minor artist whom major ones might well envy while criticules continue to carp and gnash the stubs of their teeth."