PARTISAN REVIEW
155
ADA OR NADA
ADA OR ARDOR: A FAMILY CHRONICLE.
By
Vladimir Nabokov. Me:–
Graw-Hili. $8.95.
The nearly unanimous chorus of acclaim with which
Ada
has
been greeted can perhaps be accounted for by a lack of self-confidence
among its readers, an uncritical reverence for what is difficult and bor–
ing. Having struggled through the book and found it nearly as long
and hard as those of Proust or Joyce, the intimidated reader concludes
that it must be as good. Once the dull job of reading it is over, the
book
is
fun to figure out. A puzzle, however, is not the same thing as a
novel.
At least in intent,
Ada
is certainly a major work, an attempt to
write the quintessential novel, to hypostatize in ultimate form the con–
ventions of its greatest subject, romantic love. Its incestuous lovers,
Ada and Van, are "a unique, super-imperial couple," emblematic in
their beauty, brilliance, and high degree, and embellished with faults
that are more like virtues - insatiable sexual appetitites and a lordly con–
tempt for others in which the rest of the world can only acquiesce, in
view of their stunning qualifications. As everyone must know by now,
the book is full of literature, and Van and Ada are well aware of the
tradition they represent. Ada in particular is self-conscious about being
a girl in a book and likes to preface her remarks with such phrases as
"Speaking as a character in an old novel ..." She calls Van
«men
cher Rene"
after the young man who loves his sister in Chateaubriand's
romance, and for some reason compares herself to Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park.
The novel is set on a planet called Demonia, or anti-Terra, a sort
of fraternal twin of Terra, our earth, in the province of Estotiland,
located about where Canada is on our globe and populated by settlers of
Russian, Irish and French descent. Fabulously wealthy Russo-Irish
aristocrats, ostensibly cousins but really siblings (not half sibliings, as
some reviewers have said: both are offspring of the liaison between
Demon Veen and Marina Durmanova), Van and Ada Veen become
lovers during a summer at Ardis Hall, the Veen estate, when he is four–
teen and she is only twelve. Ada and Ivan are eventually discovered by
their father and turned out of their incestuous Eden. Van divides his
mature years between debauchery and psychiatry until at last Ada
is
restored to him at fifty, to live happily ever after, collaborating with
him in her nineties on his memoirs, the book we read.
In spite of its fairy-tale geography and genealogy, Demonia
is
not
quite nowhere; in its tricks with time and space, its mixture of Russia
