"Death is often the point of life's joke," is one character's trenchant bon mot in a novel that is itself a cruel and brilliant extended joke. Nabokov lets us in on its punchline straight away. In the opening lines, we're informed that Albinus – husband, father, wealthy Berliner art critic (and, it soon emerges, as chinless a nebbish as they come) – abandons his wife for the pretty and petulant teenager Margot, who dreams of money and movie stardom. Her venality, slyness and casual cruelty make her deliciously vile; unsurprisingly, things do not end well. As the novel's opening paragraph concludes, Albinus: "loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster".

Nabokov's deadpan narration charges the novel with countless blackly hilarious moments. Rex provides many of them: Margot's first lover, an artist and film producer, enters her and Albinus's grasping relationship as a man whose "itch to make fools of his fellow men amounted almost to genius". And Albinus, naturally, is made a fool of. Returning from his child's deathbed, he finds Margot "supine, smoking lustily", feeling "delicious content". Rex, Nabokov adds with glee, "had left a short time before, well-contented too".

Written in Russian, the novel was translated into English by Nabokov himself after he deemed a previous effort by Winifred Roy lacking. Extraordinarily, though, he still considered it his worst novel. In the pairing of the girlish Margot with the helplessly lustful Albinus, it certainly presages the one widely considered his best. Written 23 years before Lolita, Laughter in the Dark may not have its successor's reach and subtlety, but it contains a final scene that is truly devastating.