Laughter in the Dark: A Thriller of Unequal Sight

David Lapadat | Music PhD

17 minutes ago

7 min read

Full spoilers: This essay discusses the novel in full, including its ending.

At the private screening of Margot’s film, Albinus, who has left his wife for her, leans across Rex to whisper his admiration. Rex, her secret lover, has been holding her hand in the dark. The effort to reach Margot almost makes Albinus embrace the man deceiving him: Nabokov arranges the bodies so that an affectionate movement displays the relationship Albinus cannot see. Before anyone leaves a seat, the scene has acquired the danger of discovery.

The narration keeps that danger alive by passing among three responses to the same performance. Albinus notices how badly Margot acts; the childish effort touches him because it recalls the cinema where they met. Margot sees her mother’s face and gestures in her own projected image, including the expression used to please an influential tenant. Her dreamed escape from a porter’s household returns as a likeness she must watch in public. Rex already expects her failure and anticipates the use he can make of it: anger with Albinus will bring her to his room. Each response explains a different future for the three people sitting together. We can follow all of them while each character acts within a much smaller field.

This is where Laughter in the Dark becomes a real thriller for me. The movement between minds makes a nearly stationary encounter unstable, and the discrepancies have enough emotional substance to sustain our attention even when nothing is being concealed from us. Albinus’s tenderness, Margot’s shame and Rex’s calculation can all be understood without becoming equivalent. The novel is less persuasive when coincidences do the work of forcing those lives together, or when a character changes faster than the narration gives us reason to follow. Its remarkable command of perception makes those shortcuts especially noticeable.

Suspense after the ending has been announced

The opening paragraph has already disclosed Albinus’s abandonment of his wife, his unreturned love and his disastrous end. That summary gives the narrator command of the outcome; the scenes must establish why we should care about its approach. At the screening, each shift of viewpoint changes the meaning of a gesture we have just seen. Albinus’s praise is painful to Margot and useful to Rex, yet the narrator insists that he “really was enchanted.” The phrase lets sincere affection survive inside a scene whose arrangement makes him ridiculous. Our advantage over Albinus becomes uncomfortable because we know both what escapes him and what he actually feels.

Nabokov first creates that divided attention at the Argus cinema, where Albinus encounters Margot working as an usher. A torch discloses a face and a slight figure; a briefly lit cheek seems to him the work of a painter. His visual judgment completes the woman before he knows anything about her. The following chapter gives us the history his picture excludes: the porter’s household, her ambition to reach the movies, modeling, poverty and exploitation. Placing her past after his enchantment lets us measure the distance between a convincing image and the person it claims to contain. Later, even her bad acting can be absorbed into the memory he prizes. The early selection has become a way of handling contrary evidence.

That habit remains a choice at the point where the novel most severely tests him. On the morning of his daughter Irma’s funeral, Albinus knows that returning to his wife, Elisabeth, could make reconciliation possible. In Irma’s former nursery, now occupied by a ping-pong table, he bounces a ball and pictures Margot playing. Nabokov lets one association displace another inside the very room that should recall the child. The same process continues beside the sleeping Margot: her face revives their first night together, while his imagined future with Elisabeth becomes a dim passage containing abandoned things. The prose gives the competing futures unequal vividness as desire wins his attention. His answer when Margot asks where he is going—“Nowhere”—closes a route he has clearly understood. The scene makes his responsibility legible without making Irma’s death a punishment for his affair or his later torment something he deserves.

Rex and the narrator’s advantage

Rex’s profession as a caricaturist gives this uneven distribution of knowledge a disturbing model. His preferred version of a story about a painter on a scaffold would let the painter step backward into empty space while spectators wait for the familiar rescue. He imagines the audience’s expectation as part of the cruelty: they know enough to anticipate safety and must watch it fail. With the novel’s disaster announced, we too occupy a position from which another person’s confident movement can be seen approaching catastrophe. Rex gives that pleasure a face, and makes it difficult to treat superior knowledge as an innocent possession.

His cartoonishness partly belongs to that design. He wants people to complete their own humiliation with only a small intervention from him, much as a caricature makes a recognizable feature do disproportionate work. The childhood atrocities supplied by the narrator, however, insist heavily on a viciousness his adult games already demonstrate. A genuine attachment to Margot complicates him, but the lurid childhood résumé can still make the villain feel overdrawn. Understanding his function in the novel leaves that reservation intact.

Leona Toker’s account of detail drawing attention away from the narrator helps explain how readily we become absorbed in these arrangements. The narrator’s audible judgments can also push the reader toward Rex’s vantage. When Rex consoles Albinus with invented stories, the narration describes his reflections as “not too profound for the mind of his listener.” Their falsity already establishes Albinus’s vulnerability; the added assessment invites us to enjoy his intellectual inadequacy as well. Compare the insistence on his real enchantment at the screening: there the narrator preserves a feeling inside the absurdity. The difference between those interventions determines how long we can inhabit Albinus’s distress before the telling invites us to laugh at him. At times the invitation presses too insistently, as though the novel were making sure we admired its cleverness.

How the chalet makes us listen

After a car crash destroys Albinus’s sight, the mountain chalet transfers control of his pictured world to Margot and Rex. Margot names the room’s colors falsely at Rex’s prompting. The description is available to us as a lie and to Albinus as the means of imagining his surroundings, so the same words furnish two different rooms. Rex enjoys having prescribed the colors of the one Albinus occupies in his mind. The earlier habit of selecting a desirable image now leaves Albinus dependent on people who can compose it for him.

Keeping Rex’s presence secret requires more than false description. At meals he synchronizes his chewing with Albinus’s, while Margot speaks loudly enough to cover the extra sounds. Nabokov’s comparison with a diner in a silent film makes the timing explicit. Margot’s voice provides cover for movements the reader can see, and each movement has to remain inaudible to the man at the table. The prose gives us the means to anticipate a failure in the performance. Suspense gathers in a fork, a mouthful or a footstep because any of them could force the hidden body into Albinus’s account of the room.

When Rex chokes and then drops a fork as he withdraws, the sound does reach Albinus. Margot attributes it to Emilia, the servant, and counters his objection that she never comes in. The dialogue keeps the physical evidence and its false explanation close together, allowing us to hear how his accurate observation is denied. His increasing attention to sound therefore brings both knowledge and distress: he detects more than the pair would like, while lacking a trustworthy person with whom to establish what he has heard. Rex grows more daring as Albinus grows more alert. Their opposed adjustments sustain the danger through a sequence of small actions.

The cruelty of this arrangement gives the earlier visual comedy a different force. At the screening, Albinus can see Margot’s failure and turn it into something lovable; in the chalet, his surviving senses provide evidence that the people he trusts teach him to doubt. His recollection of having used his eyes poorly is painfully exact, but it cannot secure the world around him. Nabokov follows the consequences of his habits far enough to make their costs frightening, while allowing the tormentors’ deliberate work to remain visible. The novel’s judgment of Albinus never makes him the sole author of what is being done to him.

Where coincidence weakens the pressure

The inevitability Martin Amis finds in the novel belongs most securely to its announced destination. The route repeatedly needs assistance from chance. Rex’s reunion with Margot, two years after leaving her, has emotional preparation: he has kept a drawing of her and thought of her during their separation. That makes the revived attachment credible. Bringing him back at a party in Albinus’s home is nevertheless a conspicuously efficient way to assemble the triangle. Remembered affection explains why the encounter takes hold; it does less to make the timing feel necessary.

Chance also enlarges Margot’s power beyond her fairly limited repertoire of lies, demands and seduction. She sends a letter to Albinus’s home expecting to provoke suspicion; his absence when it arrives lets Elisabeth read it and precipitates a rupture stronger than the one Margot planned. Later, the exposure of her relationship with Rex requires a lost walk to place the travelers near Udo Conrad, a writer Albinus knows, and a recently changed bus route to leave Albinus behind while Udo travels with the pair. A French colonel’s casual remark eventually prompts Albinus to ask Udo what happened on that journey. Each link is possible. Their accumulation makes disclosure depend on convenient meetings and separations precisely when the characters’ sharply established differences might have supplied enough danger themselves.

The compressed plotting places a related strain on Margot. The screening grants her humiliation a complex inner duration: she dreads each reappearance, recognizes her mother and recoils from the distance between her ambition and her image. Her later enjoyment of Albinus’s humiliation receives less development. The desire for money, her attachment to Rex and their shared cruelty prepare the alliance, but I find the movement into sustained torment less fully inhabited than her shame. This unevenness limits the power she acquires as a character even as Albinus and circumstance increase her power in the story.

The screening remains the measure of what the novel can achieve when it gives those conflicting lives sufficient time. Albinus’s awkward effort to lean across Rex contains both the affection that makes his error painful and the proximity that makes exposure possible. Nabokov keeps both in view long enough for a row of cinema seats to sustain a thriller.