Jed Slot was in the hotel bar – being interviewed. Himself a teetotaller, Jed did all his interviews in the hotel bar, and I’d arranged to do all my interviews in there too; but whereas Slot’s sessions lasted all day long and well into the night, mine only accounted for teatime (so I often went in early and came out late, just to listen). The truth was that I had taken up Jed like a new hobby. I had even read him.

‘Eh bien. Now tell me, if you would,’ began the questioner (a shrivelled sage with a briar pipe), ‘what is the difference between the novel and the short story – I mean compositionally, in terms of praxis?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Jed, ‘the novel is more expansive. By contrast, the short story is more succinct.’

[...] Nabokov has elsewhere made the point that all writers who are any good are funny. Not funny all the time – but funny. All the lasting British novelists are funny; the same is true of the Russians (Gogol, Dostoevsky, and, yes, Tolstoy are funny); and this became true of the Americans. Franz Kafka, whatever your professor might have told you, is funny. Writers are funny because life is funny. [...]

In Nabokov’s brightly mournful late novella Transparent Things (1972), flighty Julia takes the stolid hero, Hugh Person, to the avant-garde play that everyone is talking about

Slot pounced. ‘The story is less comprehensive than the novel. In a short story you’re more aware of limitations of space. So the story provides fewer…’

I paid the extras on the bill and went upstairs for the bag, into which Elena was forcing stray pairs of shoes. I said,

‘It’s a good job Jed brought his thesaurus with him from Buffalo. He might get through the whole six weeks without saying shorter or longer.’