5. Pnin
By Vladimir Nabokov
Doubleday, 1957
"Funny" is not a quality ordinarily ascribed to Nabokov -- but he is. The laughter comes from the surprise and delight of reading an enthralling observer of the world. In "Pnin," our Russian-born professor of Russian at Waindell College frequents an unsuccessful restaurant "from sheer sympathy with failure." Timofey Pnin is a master failer, which accounts for his presence in the academy -- where Waindell's perfidious faculty members are amateurs in treachery compared with Liza, Pnin's wife. Collegiate intellectual life in general receives the back of Nabokov's hand: "Literary departments still labored under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers." But the relentless focus here is on character, which is unusual in an academic satire -- Pnin's finickiness, his drab researches, his lurches toward love and especially his awkwardness in everything from speaking the English language to putting on his overcoat. By the time we're done, we have a Russian novel in full gloom, mired in an American college campus. Who could ask for anything more?
Mr. Rosenblatt's latest novel, "Beet," an academic satire, was published last month by Ecco/HarperCollins.