Ron Rosenbaum, at his best an intelligent and entertaining culture sleuth (I found his Explaining Hitler fascinating, although it came nowhere near to an explanation), is at it again. Hard on the heels of the controversy over Vladimir Nabokov's posthumous novel The Original of Laura--in the course of which RR first publicly urged Dmitri, VN's son, to burn the manuscript, then recanted and exhorted him Publish! Publish! (he published)--we have what looks to me like a nostalgic attempt on RR's part to relive those glory days with an unnecessary inquiry into the essence of VN's great Pale Fire. "[A]s I read and reread the novel," he says, "and sometimes just the poem, it began to dawn on me. Maybe the poem wasn't meant as a pastiche, a parody...Once it dawned on me that the poem might not be a carefully diminished version of Nabokov's talents, but Nabokov writing at the peak of his powers in a unique throwback form (the kind of heroic couplets Alexander Pope used in the 18th century), I began to write essays that advanced this revisionist view of the poem. It was actually one of these that came to the attention of Dmitri Nabokov who seemed to indicate this was his understanding as well: That his father intended the poem to be taken seriously." (Italics mine.) Ding dong. Of course he intended it to be taken seriously because it was, and is, a supreme example of his art, the parodic art. To paraphrase myself: Like Lolita and The Gift, like all his best work, Pale Fire is parody. “[Nabokov] used parody as a springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion,” Brian Boyd, VN's biographer, has remarked. Precisely; this is the case with Pale Fire. Nabokov himself, rejecting the label “satirist,” said, “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” And he was nothing if not a player of games.