The short novel tells the story of Hugh Person, an American literary editor and proofreader, and his four trips to and from Switzerland over the course of almost two decades.

His third trip is taken in an attempt to persuade R. to make alterations to his latest manuscript, Tralatitions, which the author refuses to do, while Armande, who has come along with Hugh, is too late to see her dying mother one last time.

The police interrupt in order to interview him, and he tells them of having dreamt of the house being on fire as he restrained a series of flickering images of his companion, alternatingly Armande and other women he has known, from leaping out of it.

Finally, Hugh visits and wanders through Switzerland alone, stopping by Armande's childhood home and the hotels the two have previously stayed in, having spent the past several years in a string of hospitals after having strangled Armande in a what Person claims to remember only as a state of particularly deep sleep, having since childhood been prone to episodes of sleepwalking aided only by inducing himself into dreams of playing tennis.

In The New York Times Book Review, writer Mavis Gallant wrote, "Vladimir Nabokov, having spent his life building the Taj Mahal, has decided at the age of 73—for his own amusement and incidentally for our pleasure—to construct a small mock replica.