Great & Delightful Rarity

KING, QUEEN, KNAVE by Vladimir Nabokov. 272 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.95.

This is Vladimir Nabokov's second novel, written and published in Russian in 1928, when he was a 28-year-old emigre living in Berlin. It was recently roughed into English by Nabokov's son Dmitri, then tightened and buffed to a cold brilliance by the author. "Of all my novels," says Nabokov, "this bright brute is the gayest. Expatriation, destitution, nostalgia had no effect on its elaborate and rapturous composition."

Actually, his later novels, notably Lolita and Pale Fire, are far more elaborate. Even Laughter in the Dark (originally published in 1932 as Camera obscurd), which in setting, plot and theme strongly resembles King, Queen, Knave, is more intricately patterned. But King, Queen, Knave is tricky enough--the ap-pearance-and-reality theme as applied to the eternal love triangle. In Nabokov's idiosyncratic geometry, all three angles are obtuse: Kurt Dreyer, fiftyish, owner of a prosperous department store, is suffused with a jocular egomania; Martha, his 34-year-old wife, beautiful and sybaritic, is dimmed by compulsively romantic restlessness and anticipation; Franz, Dreyer's youthful nephew and employee, is a myopic, precariously balanced bumpkin.

Dreyer and Franz occasionally attempt to squirm out of the two-dimensional plane in which Nabokov holds them captive. But most of the time, all three are as flat and glossy as the playing cards suggested by the novel's title. This enables Nabokov to give them the nimble shuffle that characterizes the mercurial plots of all his Action.

Lifeless Lump. Franz first encounters his uncle and aunt accidentally in a train compartment. They are unaware of his identity, as he is of theirs. Not a word is exchanged between him and them during the entire trip from his small home town to Berlin, where he will work in his uncle's department store. Dreyer idly casts a professional eye over the young spectacled passenger, sizing him up by the low quality of his haberdashery. In Martha's peephole of a mind, Franz registers as little more than a lifeless lump.

Nabokov lingers over the coincidence of the encounter, but his timing is nearly perfect. By drawing it out, he sharpens the anticipation of the impending adultery; before long, Martha, the frosty doll, and Franz, promoted from lifeless lump to "warm and pliant wax," can't get enough of each other.

The affair thrives, despite burlesqued escapes from detection, and Martha evolves a plan to drown Dreyer, inherit his millions and marry Franz. "My dining room, my earrings, my silver, my Franz," she muses. Martha, in fact, is so greedy that she aborts the murder plot at the last moment because her husband remarks that he is about to fatten his estate with $100,000 from the sale of a patent for mechanical mannequins. The appearance of these "automanne-quins" raises the question of who is real and who is not--one of those Nabokovian diversions that in later novels are more subtly conceived, often with the impish intention of trapping overanxious symbol hunters.

Fiction as Artifice. There are other such feints in the novel, including a jarring and inexplicable projection of Franz into a diseased old age, and a lunatic landlord who constantly threatens to break up the game but never does. But in the end, it is the author's stylized and intentionally visible hand that collects all bets. Martha succumbs meekly to pneumonia. Franz, relieved of his responsibilities as stud and killer, leaps into madness. Dreyer continues good-naturedly to misread all signs.

Here, as in Nabokov's more sophisticated novels, an important theme is the nature of fiction itself. By putting his comic trio through a series of abstract stances--a modification of the futurist and expressionist influences that swept the arts in the '20s--he never allows the reader to forget that fiction is essentially artifice. In King, Queen, Knave, the artifice may be a little too obvious, but intelligence and wit keep it working smoothly to the end. Nabokov himself could well have been thinking of this "bright brute" when he described a certain variety of butterfly he once discovered in the French Alps: "It may not rank high enough to deserve a name, but whatever it be--a new species in the making, a striking sport, or a chance cross--it remains a great and delightful rarity."

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