Nabokov's writing is sophisticated in the way that good music is sophisticated: we have not only to remember the theme, but to be able to recognize it when it reappears in another key, rhythmically altered, inverted, or combined with other themes…. [Reading] Nabokov is an active process of making connections between different parts of the text: we become not mere readers, but finders of the narrative. (pp. 220-21)

Transparent Things is not the most difficult of Nabokov's works, but its concentrated brevity makes it the most exemplary: what we have to do in order to read the other novels we must do in an exaggerated fashion in order to read Transparent Things. It is notable for its almost relentless internal allusiveness … the system of "recurrences, correspondences, and coincidences" that runs throughout the typical Nabokov novel…. Instead of the smooth and seemingly natural one-directional flow from sentence to sentence in the well-made novel, we must constantly move back and forth within the text. (pp. 222-23)

At the end of Transparent Things everything vanishes, leaving … the essential grin of the Design, the tracings of the relationships within the "tangle of random destinies." But in order to do the untangling the reader cannot submit himself passively to the flow of a dreamlike narrative: he must be wide awake, an active finder and maker of patterns. He must see how almost any set of circumstances can be seen as a coincidence. Any enumeration of the coincidences in Transparent Things cannot be exhaustive since the possibilities of "putting two things together" are limitless. Some of the coincidences are parodies of the coincidences that novelists allow themselves, such as the banality of the chance meeting on the train. Some are only apparent coincidences, as in the many instances where Julia and Hugh imagine they see or hear traces of their former lovers. (pp. 227-28)

Nabokov, like any novelist, is the king, compelling us to write down the "situations and sums" and to add them up. Shall we write down the repetition of the name Moore? The fact that there are two mothers who are daughters of country veterinarians? As in Wonderland, the apparent arbitrariness is a way of reminding us that ordinarily there are rules which govern the way novelists and readers conduct their business. Novelists don't usually break the surface tension in time or space: they don't say "no relation" before the other character is introduced. To read Transparent Things is to be reminded of the rules for determining relevance which experienced readers of novels know. Better yet, the multiplication of circumstances and the excess of coincidence remind us of what it's like not to know the rules. (pp. 228-29)

As we read Transparent Things we see potential relationships everywhere: any element in the narrative can coincide with another in the most literal O.E.D. sense. They can "fall together and agree in position, occupy the same area or portion of space" …; they can "occur or happen at the same time, occupying the same space of time" as in the convergences at the moment of the characters' deaths; or they can be "identical in substance, nature, or character."… A novel like Transparent Things is a demonstration of the extent to which a novelist can explore the possibilities of turning information into form.

Nabokov, like any novelist, must transform the contingent details of his narrative into a pattern that the mind can hold. As we read Nabokov we become aware of the extent to which we are responsive to pattern. Almost any kind of repetition can become the sort of convergence that turns information into form. Like Laurence Sterne, Nabokov expands our sense of the kinds of circumstances and the range of connections that can be made significant in a narrative. (pp. 229-30)

Nabokov shows us in Speak, Memory that the distinctively human task is to "picket Nature." Art and the faculties that Nabokov associates with art, such as memory and imagination, are the ways that we have of being unnatural, of acting upon the world rather than merely passively experiencing it. (p. 230)

When we read Nabokov we must be ready to go back to "A" instead of advancing steadily towards "Z." We must ask ourselves the question that echoes throughout Ada: "Where have I seen that before?" A color, a gesture, a random object, a number, an intonation of speech can turn up later in the narrative, and we must remember that we have seen it before. Everything must be seen as potentially relevant, a piece of conclusive evidence to be written down on our slates. Nabokov could say … that his books are histories of what passes in a man's mind since they are concerned with the way in which we combine and recombine the images we perceive, the images we remember, the images we dream, and the images we imagine in either the loose and private daydream or the more disciplined structures of art…. [The] mark of the Nabokovian hero, whether he be Hugh, Van, Humbert, or Kinbote, is that however much may lie outside his field of vision, his eye is never innocent. It is the lover who makes connections and sees everything as sign and symbol, a reminder of the beloved or her duplicity. The erotic is the ground against which the world can make a figure.

Nabokov also makes sure that the eye of his reader does not remain innocent. We must always know where we have seen that before—either elsewhere in the scramble of the book, or elsewhere in the Nabokov canon, or elsewhere in literature or art. To read Transparent Things means being able to rearrange the elements of the narrative into classes…. We see that everything is "tralatitious" or potentially so—susceptible to being transferred and linked up with something else. The text and the world which the Nabokovian hero "reads" are rich because they afford so many opportunities to make patterns out of what would otherwise be mere contingencies. As we read Transparent Things (or any other novel by Nabokov), we witness and perform "acts of attention": we become aware of how, what, and why we notice, and what we do with what we have noticed. The novels instruct us in noticing asymmetries and convergences. They offer the alert reader … a complete course of study in how Nabokovian narratives signify…. (pp. 230-31)