I have not yet read Pale Fire, but I loved Lolita and hope to read it soon. Nabokov's writing is so rich, the writing itself (aside from the story!) is worth lingering over and savoring. I've only found a few other writers with a similar quality - Proust, Milton, perhaps Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison. Does anyone know of authors with a similar property? I'm not even sure what to call it, so it's difficult to search for.
I’d recommend “All the kings men” by Robert Penn Warren. It sounds like a political book but it’s not. It’s more like The Great Gatsby in that the structure is as much about the narrator. Also the writing lapses into “overly poetic” like McCarthy.
Look into Marc Leyner, especially the novel Et Tu, Babe and anything he wrote before that. He specifically set out to create prose where each sentence could stand alone as something beautiful. I think he’s not often taken seriously because he’s simply so extremely funny that he gets pigeonholed as a comic writer. But as his best he crafted English prose at the highest level.
The term you are after, used to describe authors noted for their use of language is prose stylist. Given your examples I think you'll adore Moby-Dick; what Melville pulls off there is astonishing.
I would check out John Crowley, starting with Little, Big. One of the great American prose stylists.
Hilary Mantel is very good. I haven't read the Wolf Hall books, but A Place of Greater Safety is beautiful and deserves to be better known.
I would also nominate Gene Wolfe, especially The Book of the Sun. Fits very well with the subject matter of Nabokov, as it is also a clever metatextual puzzle, albeit a very different kind.
