Lolita

This is the first time I’ve ever been persecuted for my reading material.

“That looks like a girl’s book,” my boss says. I’m working out front, letting kids into the D-Hall. It requires no attention to do, and no one minds that I read. Well, usually.

“It’s not,” I reply, not looking up because I’m right near the end and Nabokov has got me completely. “It’s Lolita,” I say.

No glimmer of comprehension. I hold up the cover.

“What’s it about?” she asks.

Published in 1955, Lolita is the story of a pedophiliac Frenchmen and his doomed love for Dolores Haze, a 13 year old nymphet a.k.a. Lolita (Dolores -> Lo -> Lola -> Lolita). In fact, Nabokov introduced the term ‘nymphet’ to the reading public, as well as acquainting them with one of the most remarkably executed first person narrators I’ve come across, Humbert Humbert.

But back to the story. I give my boss the short version of the above paragraph, and once she hears the word ‘pedophile,’ her eyes start to widen. By the time I finish, they’re bugged out, and she nearly shouts, “That’s disgusting! Why would you read something like that?”

Wrong footed by her outburst, I explain that it’s just a book, and one that’s held in pretty high regard.  Modern Library released a list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. For what it’s worth, Lolita’s at 4.

“I can’t believe it. Who would write something like that?”

“Vladimir Nabokov,” I tell her, completely bewildered. This is the kind of passion that leads to book burnings and bannings.

“Of course it’s some guy,” she says. She rants for a little while, the drift of it being that I’m a pervert for reading something with so objectionable a subject matter. At this point, I’ve finally shook the confusion and I’m angry, both at being verbally assaulted for the book I’m reading, but also because of the book in particular. My boss’s disgust arose from a wrongheaded assumption that this was something salacious and grotesque. The publishers of the fifties had similar reactions. But while Lolita’s subject matter might make some uncomfortable, this is art at the highest level, a deeply felt affirmation of all the things literature can do best, a book which features jaw dropping prose, a singular and precious cultural artifact produced by a master craftsman working at the peak of his abilities. And my boss is going to write it off as the damp-handed workings of some pervert?

“So are you saying books shouldn’t be written about this kind of stuff?”

“No,” she says. “Does he die, at least?”

“He’s in jail at the start of the book,” I explain, which placates her somewhat.

“Did he kill somebody? Like did he kill the girl’s father?” I can see the revolting plot forming in her eager mind, the story of a pedophile murdering the father of a virtuous girl for his own sordid exploitation. She couldn’t be more wrong, but we’ll get to the plot in a bit.

“I haven’t gotten that far,” I say.

“I still can’t believe you’d read something like that.”

“What about an article in the newspaper about a pedophile?” I ask. “Would that be okay to read?”

“Only if he gets arrested.” (That was a real headscratcher.) “There’s enough of that kind of stuff happening in the world without people writing books about it.”

I’d reached that point in an argument when you realize nothing you say will be heard or considered. My boss had not.

“Do you have a sister?” she asks me. “Or what if you had a daughter? Do you know anybody who’s been molested?”

“No,” I say.

“Don’t you think that’d change your perspective? You think you’d still want to read something like that?” she asks, staring suspiciously at Lolita, like some playground pervert might leap out of it right then and there, wearing a trenchcoat and nothing else.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” I tell her. I had to get back to work.

“Enjoy your reading!” she shouts after me.

*

While I didn’t know what to say to my boss, I’ve got plenty of things to say to you; so let’s start.

…

That last sentence might not be true. I started this review the night I finished Lolita, and it’s been four days since. And here I am, not quite sure what to say to you. A lot of this has to do with class. I spend much of my days in gloomy, gray-carpeted rooms with no windows, stretching my back in an uncomfortable desk and listening to the rest of my classmates in the horseshoe arrangement talk about how this or that “struck” them. How easy it is to forget, in those air-conditioned rooms stale with the sounds of Interpretations and Opinions, that I love books.

Lolita’s a terrific reminder, and while I don’t want to gush at you, I’m tired of lugging out the critical apparatus to try and punch holes in a text. So I’ll rave, but I promise to keep it short.

I like writers who set themselves challenges, especially those who seek to humanize initially unlikeable characters. I praised it in The Bone People, and in Finn – all that goes double for Humbert Humbert. He’s a pedophile not content with kiddie porn, and does some monstrous things in his pursuit of Lolita. Once he gets her, things get even worse. The bare facts of the character seem to preclude him from ever being a sympathetic or understandable protagonist. Nabokov does it anyway, and solves the problem rather creatively. Instead of depicting Humbert as some kind of deviant, the victim of genetics, society, fate, whatever, he makes him funny, and incredibly romantic. All this through his voice, one of the most effusive, garrulous, and just plain strange you’ll find. Humbert does literary scholarship when he’s not stalking nymphets, so he’s a very literate narrator, and peppers his story with high-brow references and snatches of French. Keep that in mind when reading this passage:

She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity; she surveyed it witha  shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident “what d’you think you are doing?” was all I got for my pains. To the wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would — invariably, with icy precision — plump for the former.

You can see the playfulness with language, and Nabokov enjoys his puns. But Humbert’s also a diehard romantic, which somehow mitigates the seediness of his dysfunction. In fact, sometimes you’ll forget just how monstrous Humbert is, his voice can be so persuasive — then you’ll realize the enormity of his actions. He doesn’t just lust after Lolita, he loves her, and that complication challenges our kindly view of love. Is there such a thing as a wrong love? Nabokov works hard to make it a sincere and empathetic love, which clouds the issue further.

As you can see from these quotes, Nabokov’s a writer to envy. Of course, he’s a Russian, so English is a second or third language for him, which makes his mastery even more infuriating. It’s like Joseph Conrad, who, according to Wikipedia, hadn’t “learned to speak English fluently until he was in his twenties.” Maybe coming into the language without much experience of it gives you a fresher ear, one that doesn’t accept the many cliches and commonplaces we natives have heard all our lives, and so reach for while working.  Just one more sampling of Nabokov’s descriptive eye:

One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position — a knight’s move from the top — always strangely disturbed me.

So, Nabokov’s got the three components of Great literature in spades — great writing, great characters, and great feeling. When you throw in a transgressive vision, and the aesthetic courage you have to have to tackle a subject like that, you end up with an all-time classic. I don’t remember being so taken with a book since I read Revolutionary Road. I closed that review by saying: “I can’t imagine any other book this year topping it, but I’d love it if it were possible.” Of course, by the end of the year I’d read two books I enjoyed even more, Gravity’s Rainbow and Tree of Smoke. Here’s hoping there’s a repeat performance this year, because the world needs books as good as Lolita. Even if my boss doesn’t think so.

PS: If you read this book, do yourself a favor and check out Stephen Metcalf’s terrific essay on Slate.