Since Proust we have accepted the view that memory is an art, maybe the sole art to have survived God’s death, and that nostalgia may encapsulate a metaphysic. Until V. V. Nabokov came to America in 1940 we Americans had no great modern artist in nostalgia of our own, although F. Scott Fitzgerald strikes the authentic note when he imagines Nick Carraway observing Gatsby waiting for the green light in the closing paragraphs ofThe Great Gatsby. Gatsby mistakes the past for the future — the characteristic error of nostalgists — when he anticipates a reunion with Daisy, that shopworn...