John Banville is no stranger to the Nabokov-List. A quick google-search in this area offers references to JB in 2010,.2005... We find him reviewing Nabokov's books or writing a foreword to new editions, in various mentions easily available in the internet*

 

The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (McSweeney's Publishing, 2005-2007) carries an interview between Ben Ehrenreich and John Banville, among a host of others.

In Ehrenreich's prefatory observations, Banville's character, a painter named Jean Vaublin, is a "nabokovian character." 

A second reference to Nabokov, this time by John Banville himself, appears after he admits to being close to sixty and feeling invited to a retrospective examination, to revisit his old first love. It is when he says that, for him Nabokov's "Lolita" first pages describe an unequalled instance of "the purest summer love affair."  

 

 

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* A sampling:

Controversy surrounds the publication of Nabokov's last, unfinished work.  "The Still Mysterious Enchanter, July 15, 2010  by John Banville.

(excerpts: "Aptly, we may begin with the title. The dust jacket has it as The Original of Laura: A novel in fragments, while the title page varies this to The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun). However, the author himself, at the top of the first of the 138 file cards on which the novel—let us call it a novel, for now—is composed, calls the book merely The Original of Laura. The subtitle A novel in fragments is easily accepted as an editor's addendum, since the book is published posthumously, but where did (Dying Is Fun) come from? Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd tells us that The Original of Laura: Dying Is Fun was "a first tentative title" that Nabokov noted in his diary in December 1974...The book comes to us out of a nebulous region...For all that, though, the inevitable question arises: If Nabokov said he wanted the draft of The Original of Laura destroyed...why now, thirty-two years later, has their son decided to publish and risk being damned? It is not a nice thing to have to say in the circumstances, but Dmitri Nabokov's introduction is a lamentable performance, stridently defensive, slippery on particulars, and frequently repellent in tone...Nabokov was a famously meticulous stylist—none more so, surely, among his contemporaries—and would have died before he would have let work appear that had not been polished to the highest finish. Well, he did die, and the work has been published. Polished it is not, fragmented it is. What we have, in fact, is little more than a blurred outline, a preliminary shiver of a novel. And yet.This edition is a triumph of the book maker's art...Knopf's The Original of Laura is magic right through, from the dust jacket, in sideways-fading white on black with just the merest flicks of gules, past the cloth cover that reproduces the last words of Nabokov the novelist...And the fiction? It is a flux; even the names of the characters are not fixed... One realizes again what an artistic blessing in disguise it was that the exigencies of the times forced Nabokov relentlessly westward, for America was the biggest and best gift a writer such as he could have received, given his inclination toward mere cleverness and the dandyism of the boulevard...yes, the alliteration is catchingof a narrator writhing in spiritual pain. Nabokov's return to Europe after the great success of Lolita and Pale Fire (1962) saw a falling off, or at least a falling back into the bad old prewar ways...The Original of Laura is altogether too knowing for its own good, and the tone grates on the ear and the nerves, so that one feels that one has been buttonholed by a relentlessly garrulous flaneur.Still, the book is deeply interesting, not so much for what it thinks itself to be as for what we know it is: a master's final work..."

 

( Banville's) "The Sea" reminds me of that other exacting wordsmith of the literary realm, Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote his first nine novels in Russian, but when he switched to English, proved he knew it better than the native speakers.  Also like Nabokov, Banville is skilled at capturing that fussy, almost neurotic inward tilt to the psyche that imparts to a narrator a certain solipsistic élan.  Max Morden, the petulant widower who guides us through The Sea fits the bill with precision. 'The tea bag is a vile invention,' he announces in a typical aside, 'suggestive to my perhaps overly squeamish eye of something a careless person might leave behind unflushed in the lavatory.' You get the idea."  Reviewed by Ted Gioia.
John Banville at www.contemporarywriters.com - Irish novelist John Banville was ... join more typical Banvillian allusions to Nabokov and Proust in this ...
www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth13

Critical Perspective: " Regarded as the most stylistically elaborate Irish writer of his generation, John Banville is a philosophical novelist concerned with the nature of perception, the conflict between imagination and reality, and the existential isolation of the individual. While his writing flirts with both postmodernism and magic realism, it is best understood as metafiction in the tradition of Samuel Beckett, Banville's acknowledged mentor....Relentlessly and some might argue, pretentiously allusive, his works play with both overt and hidden references to his literary idols, particularly Proust, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov...In his earliest fiction, Long Lankin (1970) and Nightspawn (1971), Banville marked out his non-realist territory and his interest in metaphysical ideas, but was criticised for technical self-indulgence and verbosity. With Birchwood (1973), he retained his tendency to baroque prose, but harnessed it more successfully to a Gothic fantasy...Echoes of Dickens' Bleak House, (one character even spontaneously combusts), join more typical Banvillian allusions to Nabokov and Proust in this characteristically poetic meditation on the relationship between memory and imagination...A new John Banville novel is as great a pleasure as a new Nabokov once was. Banville is Nabokov's stylistic heir; he's the greatest living artist of English prose. I'm delightedly immersed in The Infinities, his latest, whose conceit is that the gods of Olympus have never gone away but watch over us yet; the novel is narrated by one of them, Hermes. In the hands of a lesser artist this would be an irritating affectation, but Banville is a greater, not a lesser, artist. It works..."

Banville, the New Nabokov 3 May 2010 ... A new John Banville novel is as great a pleasure as a new Nabokov once was. Banville is Nabokov's stylistic heir; he's the greatest living ...www.rogerboylan.com/the-snug/banville-the-new-nabokov -