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Laughter in the Dark is a love story or rather it is a caricature of a love story. And telling the tale Vladimir Nabokov becomes grotesquely melodramatic.
The world is the stage and life is a play:

The stage manager of this performance was neither God nor the devil. The former was far too gray, and venerable, and old-fashioned; and the latter, surfeited with other people’s sins, was a bore to himself and to others, as dull as rain�� in fact, rain at dawn in the prison-court, where some poor imbecile, yawning nervously, is being quietly put to death for the murder of his grandmother.

The hero is an infatuated idealist living with his head in the romantic clouds so he is doomed right from the start��

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

An object of the unbound adoration is a small-minded underage girl that is capable of nothing but to take��

“A lovely creature, unquestionably but there is something snakelike about her.��

And the happy rival is a cynical and unprincipled rascal��

His culture was patchy, but his mind shrewd and penetrating, and his itch to make fools of his fellow men amounted almost to genius. Perhaps the only real thing about him was his innate conviction that everything that had ever been created in the domain of art, science or sentiment, was only a more or less clever trick.

Laughter in the Dark is a parable of idealistic blindness: some are born to deceive others and some are born to be deceived.