Ada is Vladimir Nabokov’s longest book, and the first of his late European period after he found fame with Lolita then devoted ten years to his controversial, literalist translation of Eugene Onegin. It shares many features and themes with his earlier work, but is also strikingly different: massive, heavy-going and sometimes impenetrable, it stands in contrast with the lightness and economy of his American work.
I tend to think of Ada as a maximalist, interesting failure. Nabokov described Finnegan’s Wake as “that cold pudding” of a book, and in an irony of memory I had transposed that description onto Ada. I tend to agree with Michael Wood that it’s a late rather than mature work where the ambition outstripped the result. It’s a hard book to love.
Thinking about Brian Boyd and his distinctive critical approach has got me checking out his extraordinarily detailed annotations to Ada again. I have read Ada roughly two-and-a-half times: once when I was 17, when most passed me by, once in my twenties when the shine really came off, and I’ve dipped into it at least once in the 15 years since. So I thought I’d have another go at reading it more systematically, guided by BB’s annotations.
Before I did this, as part of the discussion here I thought it would be interesting to write down what I remembered worked and didn’t work for me. We’ll see how inerrant my memory is!
What Works
- The spooky water madness and death of Aqua
- The influence of visual art quite novel in Nabokov, particularly Bosch and Bruegel – e.g. in Dan Veen’s demise (I seem to remember he gets ridden like a beast of burden?)
- The ludicrously atavistic and closed off (incestuous!) Veen family romance. It’s overbearing and claustrophobic and quite unpleasant, and is certainly memorable. A lovely description of this in the forum thread linked: “monozygotic”
- The lust and mythologising of that, Ada’s “towers” and “bridges” of “real things”, my word
- Van and Ada’s intellectual range and facility. Arguably totally over-written by Nabokov, but there’s something seductive and romantic there, especially coupled with…
- How little the “superimperial” aristocratic couple actually achieve, their banality, and Van’s general failure is nicely melancholic
- The madcap science fiction elements, the banning of electricity, there’s a lot of Lance in this book
What Doesn’t
- The length. My god man, you did so much in a couple of hundred pages in Lo, PF, Pnin .. is this really necessary?!
- It can be very, needlessly confusing
- It’s not funny. Nabokov can be really, properly funny – Lolita’s a dark comedy and a few times a year I genuinely remember and sometimes laugh out loud at the sick “know your own daughter” joke. Ada is not chucklesome.
- The incestuousness comes out too in the multilingual mash-ups, puns, puzzles. Unlike in the American novels, where if you don’t get 100% you’ll still get a heck of a lot out, these are real road-blocks to enjoyment and understanding
- Too many characters, too much lore. I heartily endorse ignoring it on a first read and letting it wash over as recommended in the thread
- I think a big one for many readers is its lack of moral frame. We want Nabokov to have a clear normative view on these characters – because they are frankly (except Lucette) horrible. Despite “I loath Van Veen” I don’t think Nabokov had a clear idea here, and (contra Wood and even Boyd) I don’t think it’s a morality tale about the mistreatment of Lucette.
- Nabokov’s no philosopher, and the Texture of Time section isn’t very profound (though I do like the device of synchronising it with Van’s drive through the mountains).
That Dr Boyd was quite a boy
I’ve also read Brian Boyd’s published thesis, Ada: The Place of Consciousness. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve got a huge amount of time for Brian Boyd and reading his The Magic of Artistic Discovery on Pale Fire was revelatory.
I’m not sure Boyd sold me on Ada, though. Boyd’s central thesis is that Ada contains a moral core: that the solipsistic, selfish lust of Van and Ada lead to Lucette’s undoing. I tend to think that Lucette just isn’t as central to the novel as Boyd argues – and where she is, the theme of innocent martyrdom is only one alongside the aesthetically lush but amoral debauchery that is just as strong.
So as I read I’m going to be weighing Boyd’s position – and his huge mass of gathered data – against a reading where sheer depravity is the engine of Ada. At times reading Ada feels closer to de Sade then it does to, say, Pnin. This is (one of the things) that can be off-putting to readers, and I think is troubling even to critics.