Big R/Big N

TRANSPARENT THINGS by VLADIMIR NABOKOV 104 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.95.

Some day Vladimir Nabokov may succeed in writing a novel that is impossible to review. Certainly Transparent Things, his first new work since Ada, would be easier to review for an audience that had already read it. Like the work of any great writer, the book is best enjoyed when read for the surprises in the story, the diaphanous beauty of the prose, the clear irony and humor. But Nabokov makes such a reading infernally difficult. He is not only writing his story but writing about writing.

The mechanics of narration, the conundrums of time and the intertwining trinity of tenses, the vexing headaches of omniscience--all these familiar aesthetic matters are considered and worked out on the page. More than usual, though, Transparent Things delivers the teller along with the tale.

Ostensibly the story concerns the problems of Hugh Person, a likable editor in a New York publishing house: his father's death, marriage to a mean-spirited girl whom he strangles in his sleep, incarceration, finally death in a hotel fire. But the presiding genius of the book is one Baron R, a famous novelist who lives in Switzerland but is published by Hugh's American firm. In fact, it is broadly hinted that Hugh may exist only as a creature of R's pen.

"Big R," as he is sometimes called, and big N have a lot in common besides Swiss residence and a New York publisher. R is the latest of the unreliable, self-mocking fictional silhouettes of himself Nabokov has written. R has a nasty reputation for deflowering very young girls, wretched insomnia, and a contempt for Freud. Since R is a writer, N has opportunities for even more teasing. One need reach no farther than the book for words to praise it. R is a "true artist . . . with a diabolically evocative style." Indeed it seems that R's prose has "a richness, an ostensible dash, that caused some of the less demanding reviewers in his adopted country to call him a master stylist." To aid that laggard crowd, Nabokov has provided some blatant examples of the wordplays he is famous for. Proofreading R's new book, he puzzles about an incidental character named Adam von Librikov. Lest anyone miss the point, Nabokov adds, "Or was the entire combination a sly scramble?"

As always, Librikov manages to find amusing new ways to air his old crotchets about the waywardness of mechanical contrivances and other intrusions upon daily serenity. The standard taxi door is accurately compared to "an opening for emerging dwarfs." The plumbing in an old hotel is like a whining, stupid pet that tries to follow one out of the lavatory. For all its naughtiness, Transparent Things is also an autumnal, even philosophical work--a feat, considering the book's brevity, even for Nabokov. Apparently finished with the luxuriant digressions of Ada, he is impatient to confront the mysteries of art and death and human folly that have always preoccupied him.

Transparent things are those "through which the past shines." Pencils, hotel rooms, characters in novels like Hugh have such potential transparency. Yet one should be wary about breaking through the film of the present. "The inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish"-- a warning to experimental novelists if there ever was one.

But the author, as a somewhat bored virtuoso of the past, yearns for access to the future that eludes even him. The fundamental note of the book is one of frustration. On the first page R wonders, "If the future existed, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive." On the last page he concludes, "This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another." Nabokov may have reached that lonely rim of consciousness himself .

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