Lawrence Weschler has observed, astutely, that writers tend to move from Romanesque to Gothic. The early work will be thick, solid, even heavy; only with decades of experience does the writer learn to chisel away excess, as the builders of Notre Dame did: to let in the light. In the case ofVladimir Nabokov, however, the converse seems to obtain. Of the major edifices he erected in English, his last, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle(1969), is his most excessive, both in its difficulty and in the pleasures it affords the (re)reader.
: "It's that kind of a book. Like Ada, you know, or Gravity's Rainbow. It teaches you how to read it as you go along")
