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Hart’s book has all the makings of a campus novel that could veer off into Nabokovian or even Verhoevian territory.

Occasionally, too, sentences attain a fleeting, Nabokovian beauty: “We rounded a bend in the road and a cloud of pale blue butterflies appeared before us, blown in perhaps from another part of the world.”

On Wednesday, the Booker judges pronounced Galgut the winner, praising his novel for its “unusual narrative style that balances Faulknerian exuberance with Nabokovian precision, pushes boundaries, and is a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century.”

Johns’s entire body of work, to go by this elephantine show of more than 500 works, is akin to a trove of Nabokovian love letters — obscure and thwarted, but also punning, mordant, full of life.

His books, most written in the first person, are lapidary, intricate, Nabokovian.