Pnin, Portrait of a Professor?

A stunning experience.  Either I have changed a lot since I first read the book or the book has changed a lot.  (The latter possibility is tempting to embrace.  Imagine a world in which books really do change between readings.  You could then go back and reread your favorite books and each time they would not just seem different, they actually would be different.  Never mind; that’s a really dumb thought experiment.) 

Now it isn’t really all that surprising that after over two decades of teaching, I am a bit different.  I’ve read a few books since then, for example.  But even still, this novel was nothing like I remembered it. 

It still had (obviously) the same episodes I remembered so vividly, but then when I thought about it I realized there were only two episodes I remembered vividly.  (Pnin on a bench in the wrong city realizing he could never get to the talk he was supposed to give; Pnin utterly dismayed—indeed more dismayed than any other character in any other book ever—when he hears glass breaking in the kitchen sink.) 

The entire story surrounding those two events was extraordinarily different than the story which existed in my memory.   

When I thought about it, it really wasn’t hard to see why my memory of the book was so different than the book as it exists.  I remembered the book as being all about a befuddled professor wandering around an idyllic campus in the Northeast.  It was an amusing tale, capturing life at a New England college perfectly. 

Why did the book seem that way?  Well imagine being a newly minted Assistant Professor, coming from a 1960s style-concrete-slab-buildings-everywhere campus in California, and arriving at one of the most gorgeous liberal arts colleges in the world, red brick buildings with ivy covered walls set amongst rolling green lawns and sparkling lakes. 

Imagine wandering to a library which is gorgeous enough to be a chapel and a chapel which is magnificent enough to be a library reading room.  Imagine an office with 12 foot ceilings and wood trimmed windows. 

And then imagine reading a book about an old professor pottering around such a campus, slightly bewildered by the world.  How could that novel not seem like an idyllic vision of a future life?  How could it not be utterly poignant when our professor hero had moments of doubt and pain? 

How could said assistant professor not henceforth recommend that novel to I don’t know how many people as the best picture of life at a Northeastern liberal arts college ever written?

I was talking with someone not too long ago about this very problem of a book which once read at a particular moment in life was forever stamped not with the book but with the memory of a book which isn’t exactly the book which is there.  He mentioned the idea of going back to write the novel he remembered.  An intriguing idea, that.

So, what is this novel?  Curiously, it feels like I am about to desecrate the novel by describing it accurately. 

That’s not a joke—I am having this terribly sick feeling right now in even thinking about writing down a review of Pnin, the book.  I feel like I am about to kill Pnin, the memory. 

Pnin, the novel, starts off as the story of a befuddled Russian refugee who is living a tenuous life as a professor at a college in New England.  The first six chapters are tales designed to mock the professor, but in every case there is a twinge of pathos mixed in with the mockery. 

We find out why in the seventh, and last, chapter.  The narrator, someone eerily similar to Nabokov himself, tells us the back story of his own past and his interactions with Pnin.  And somewhere in the midst of that last chapter we realize we have an unreliable narrator on our hands. 

Pnin stole the love of the narrator’s life and this book is a sort of revenge fantasy, but revenge on a man whom the narrator knows is actually fundamentally good and decent.  Indeed, that Pnin as described in this novel, this thoroughly pathetic figure, should have stolen the beautiful woman from our dashing hero seems improbable. 

The narrator pretends in that final chapter that it was he who rejected the woman who went on to marry Pnin because our narrator would not have her, but there is something not quite right about that story. 

In the first six chapters, one imagines that the narrator knows all these things because he knows Pnin well.  Then we discover the narrator has never spoken to Pnin at any point during or after the time when the events related in the book take place. 

Every moment in which we saw Pnin’s inner self throughout the book was necessarily pure fabrication.  Events which would have just been amusing stories are turned into lampoon by relating the inner thoughts of Pnin. 

The book is clever—but you knew that—it is Nabokov after all. 

As a portrait of life in a New England college, it’s not exactly right. A bit too much caricature designed to make Pnin look like a fish out of water. 

As a portrait of a professor, again it’s not quite right. 

As a means of thinking about how we do in fact create narratives of others, it’s pretty good.  How many people exist in our mind’s eye exactly the way we really wish they were?

Pnin, the book, is quite good.  I recommend it.

But: R.I.P. Pnin, the memory.