“Karvonen surveyed the crowd…”

Note: This post is the nineteenth installment in my author’s commentary for City of Exiles, covering Chapter 18. You can read the earlier installments here.)

On the short list of books that all writers should read at some point, two of the most interesting are Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature. Nabokov was the most formidably learned and technically skilled American novelist of the century, and for all his wit and playfulness, he can be a little daunting; as we speak, I’m working my way through Ada for the first time, and I’ve found myself repeatedly grateful for Brian Boyd’s excellent online annotations. The lectures, which were originally delivered at Wellesley and Cornell, present Nabokov at his most accessible—they were designed as a kind of oral performance, so they’re looser and less semantically dense than his written work, while still allowing his full intelligence and insight to shine through. (In particular, they’re a much better place to start with Nabokov as a critic than his commentary on Eugene Onegin, an insane work of scholarship that I love for other reasons.) And because Nabokov was one of the few modern writers both willing and qualified to go head to head with the likes of Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, and Kafka, it affords a unique glimpse into a first-rate creative mind as it grapples with its peers.

If there’s one theme that recurs throughout these lectures, it’s the importance of precise visualization by both the author and the reader. Nabokov’s original notes are filled with sketches, diagrams, and delicately rendered maps, all meant to encourage us to picture the settings, costumes, and incidental furniture of a story as accurately as possible. Writing about Anna Karenina’s railway journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg, for instance, he begins: “To comprehend certain important aspects of Anna’s night journey, the reader should clearly visualize the following arrangement…” He follows this with a detailed breakdown of the sleeping car’s seats, layout, and occupants, complete with a floor plan and a little illustration of the candle lantern that Anna uses as a reading lamp. Some of this is undoubtedly due to Nabokov’s own natural obsessiveness, as well as to his frustration with translators, like those of Onegin, who render Russian texts into English without any clear idea of what they’re describing. But even for us mortals, there’s a lesson here: if we can vividly envision the physical setting of a story, it serves as a coherent stage on which the real action of interest can take place.

I’ve tried to follow this practice in my own fiction, although on a much less elevated level. Elsewhere, I’ve spoken of my love of location research, and how the physical constraints of a real building or neighborhood are often play a crucial role in figuring out how a particular scene ought to unfold. If I’m unable to visit the location myself—as in the case of Eternal Empire, with its extended closing sequence in Sochi—I’ll do what I can to fill in the gaps with nonfiction accounts, guidebooks, photographs, and Google Maps. Occasionally, I’ll need to fudge the real geography of a place for the sake of the narrative, but when I can, I stick to reality as much as possible, to the extent of counting the number of paces from one point of importance to the next. Part of this is my sense that accuracy, or at least plausibility, in trivial matters primes readers to accept the larger leaps that a story inevitably takes, as well as a desire to avoid being called out on an obvious mistake. Ultimately, though, it’s about furnishing the set, which in turn influences the behavior of the players, and I learned long ago that it’s a waste of energy to think these things up from scratch when the world is already bursting with detail.

You see this clearly in Chapter 18 of City of Exiles, which Karvonen, my Finnish assassin, arrives at the chess tournament at the Olympia Exhibition Center, where many of the other characters are already converging. Much of the chapter is devoted to Karvonen’s study of the layout through the lens of his camera, in his guise as a photojournalist, and I spend a page or two making sure that the relative placement of rooms and other landmarks is clear. Really, I could have rearranged this space however I liked—I doubt many readers would have objected—and a sense of the geography is only incidentally important to the action that follows. Again, though, the attention I give to the scenery here is less critical in itself than in its effects. Even if I’d invented a chess tournament out of thin air and situated it in an imaginary conference center, the space needs to seem real, both for my own sake and for that of the reader. In the course of the next few chapters, there’s going to be a chase, a confrontation, and a pair of murders, all of which needs to be timed so that the complicated sequence of events remains clear. Spatial logic leads to narrative logic. And the first step is to set the stage as clearly as possible…