INVITATION TO A BEHEADING: Finished this last night. What a frustrating book! It begins brilliantly. Its sharp, twisty, surrealist prose style conveys a vivid sense of powerlessness and absurdity; its psychological portraits of the prisoner and his guards were harsh and accurate. The cloudier moments hinted at a description of a Fallen world. Nabokov (and/or his translator, a relative) had the same gift for choosing the exact right word that James Wood does–but Wood works that talent so hard, so relentlessly, that it goes from a style to a shtik, whereas Nabokov knows how not to show off.

But. About halfway through the book, I started feeling like the thing was padded. The protagonist lapsed into passivity that might be understandable in a prisoner but that meant the narrative fell slack. The bad guys’ one-dimensionality went from caustic to just strident. The surrealism became less Magritte, more Kafka, not a bad thing in itself but really not as startling. And the ending, when I finally reached it, struck me as a real cop-out, Nabokov refusing to make a crucial decision about where his book would end and what it would ultimately say. Like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book with the back pages ripped out–you’d think it would be even more open to the reader’s imagination, but in fact it’s just an unfinished bridge to nowhere.

Should have been a novella, or even a short story.