Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore.
When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. The story is a slight thing at best-a frail straw in the wind.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Ganin thinks of going to meet Mary and spiriting her away-of course he doesn't. This occasions the "eternal return" through memory to a time when tender was the night and gentle the tryst (the inset here with its mellifluous lyricism contrasts with the glumly enclosed existence in the pension). And Ganin, who recognizes from a snapshot that Mary was his first romance. Briefly here in Berlin, in the gracelessly German, heavy, dusty pension of Frau Dorn, a number of exiles have rooms: a brace of ballet-dancer homosexuals an aging, failing poet one Alfyorov who within a few days will be joined by the pretty wife he married before he emigrated. This is Nabokov's first novel (Mashenka), more properly novella, which is best read for its germinal indications of the later works to follow: particularly the theme of the emigre in transition which will be so triumphantly realized in another habitat, Pnin and the retrospective refrains of Speak, Memory.
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