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is € * Wet ——Se—————————e—e———————————]{"C—SEEE KING, QUEEN, KNAVE. By Vladimir Nabokov, Trans- lated by Dinitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. McGraw-Hill. 272 pp. $5.95. By Paul West Most eternal triangles look alike and are alike, their principle — as, Nabokov reveals with icy panache in this, his second, novel — being the uses to which the participants put or do not put their God-given sexuality. Eternal trisngularity is as bald, as banal, as that, not- withstanding the hint in “eternal” of a sublime venality to which all triangulators, as programmed cards being shuffied in God’s pack, are entitled. Ownership of the beloved’s body counts for more, it seems, than access to his or her soul. Adultery is flesh and hydrodynamics only, Implying all this in frissons of sardonic gaiety, King, Queen, Knave — first published in Berlin in Russian in 1928 and itself set in Berlin — can be read as a sermon. Or as a long sneer. Ostensibly the story of Franz, who comes from the provinces to work in his uncle’s em- porium but soon begins to cuckold him as well, it is also, even predominantly, an exercise in articulate super- ciliousness. Not that Nabokov morally censures either the fumbling nephew or the expertly lascivious Frau Dreyer; for they, like the mechanical walking dolls that Herr Dreyer (say it aloud) plans for his shop and dotes upon, are puppets only: queen and knave. But he can, and does, judge them on aesthetic grounds. While lust, boredom and suburban romsaticism go to work on the two lovers, conducting them to the cliché terminus of plotting a murder they cannot accomplish, Nabokov ridicules them in several ways. Simply, he views the erotics with a mechanic's ooo Or ee Paul West teaches English at Pennsylvania State Uni- versity, eee Kim Philby é “gf Nabokov in the Thirties aplomb: “her rapid cries expressed fierce satisfaction.” Complexly, he observes the mise en scéne with fanatical care, as if to say: how, planted amid the lush vulgarity of the Dreyer house (all the furnishings chesen by her- self), can Martha not feel herself to be part of the physical amenities? And that is how Dreyer treats and regards her. Or how, amid the shabby clutter of Franz’ apartment, can they bear their lovemaking to come to anend? Pawns rather than degenerates — he wears his pen in his pajama pocket; she, after a miscarriage, has an almost hygienic fear of pregnancy — they become “our lovers,” with which proprietorially indulgent but dis- owning phrase Nabokov annula them as people, only to incorporate them as Punch-and-Judy-couchant into a glittering heraldic design that includes dumnsies of all kinds: dolls bourgeois or battery-driven, as well as Franz’ landlord (“the whole world was but a trick of his”) whose “wife,” of «whem-Franx gets only the merest glimpse, is just a wig on a stick in a shawl, for- ever and ever in the same chair. These and sundry rich idiots, concupiscent stenog- raphers, tennis athletes, chess crouchers, a whole con- cert of dehumanized yawns and yahoo yodels, not to mention the Nabokovs themselves (“Sometimes the man carried a butterfly net .. . her fiancé or husband, slender, elegantly balding, contemptuous of everything on earth but her”) — these are the targets of his uncom sionate intelligence. The novel develops, in fact, *” -* virtuoso piece in which Nabokov the sardonic ca; . of specimens records his gratitude to the world of phe- nomena for its just being there — a cosmic favor done him because even God wouldn’t like those verbal nets of his to rot unused. Manifestly a young man’s book, coruscating with self-conscious but original cleverness and a-twitch with ebullient jubilation, King, Queen, Knave is exactly what Nabokov himself calls it in a sly foreword: “this bright brute. . . . Of all my novels .. . the gayest.” The only person it is about is, of course, himself; but then, he xs.ows himself better than many novelists know their characters, And, in an extra sense, he is here his own specimen, introduced by a “reviser,” twice older than twenty-eight, who points up the young Nabokovw’s “ami- able little imitations of Madame Bovary,” wong of “cruel traps” set for Freudians, and remarks ‘~ he lack of any emotional involvement and the fa. ,-tale freedom inherent in an unknown milieu. . . . I might have staged KQKn in Rumania or Holland.” Just a pack of cards, then, as Nabokov knows, yet hav- ing even so early the sterile sheen, the scalpeled, gloating precision that make his detractors envious at times and send his admirers into an aristocratic trance. a w Linn far mane veare Rat he knew wh-