THE MAGICIAN'S DOUBTS: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. By Michael Wood. Princeton Univ. Press. 252 pp. $24.95

"Some day a sagacious professor will write about my absolutely tragic situation," Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) once quipped to a friend. Wood, who teaches English at Princeton University, may well be that professor. Nabokov's prediction was intended as an ironic comment on his linguistic exile as a Russian-born master of English. But Wood is wise enough to go beyond the irony to locate the genuinely tragic side of the man he calls the "great, doubting magician."

Probing his conjurer's layered puns, freighted allusions, and sly ambiguities, Wood ranks Nabokov as one of the few writers whose work rewards every variety of close textual scrutiny. Accordingly, he chases linguistic bread crumbs, ferreting out "deep truths in the alphabet," unraveling acrostics, and translating bilingual puns. At the same time, Wood judges some of Nabokov's word play to be "sheer glitter," and he chides the master for expecting readers to catch every trick.

Ultimately, though, Wood sees Nabokov's flashy cerebrations as secondary to his achievement as a "theorist of pain." From his father's assassination to his family's exile from revolutionary Russia, Nabokov was ever the poet of memory and loss--loss gripped in language. "Nabokov came to understand deprivation, marginality, and helplessness as well as he did through his abandonment of Russian as a literary language," writes Wood.

Beyond grief and exile, the specific loss that preoccupies the critic is the loss of innocence. Wood addresses the moral dimension of Nabokov's obsession with immature sexuality, incest, and unnatural death without succumbing either to misguided sentimentalism or to facile cynicism. Instead (in an echo of Lionel Trilling's defense of Nabokov's most famous novel), Wood writes: "It is morally obtuse to think that Lolita is an immoral book." Admitting that Lolita does not contain a "paraphraseable moral," Wood nevertheless shows how the tormented children who populate Nabokov's fiction are a plumb line into the depths of human cruelty. He concludes: "The suffering of the innocent is what unsettles all comforts for Nabokov."

Compared with biographer Brian Boyd's two-volume behemoth, The Magician's Doubts is slim. That is because Wood ignores the "mandarin" Nabokov--that "highly stylized, highly visible" creature whom he finds "dull and narrow”--in favor of the "(real) person I guess at but who keeps himself pretty well hidden." To Wood, this Nabokov is "not only tender and observant but also diffident, even scared, worried about almost everything the mandarin so airily dismisses." This is criticism with heart: a critic not afraid to bring an author back to life.

--Genevieve Abravanel