Lolita

It will undoubtedly strike most readers as odd that one of the distinguishing features of a novel narrated by a pedophile is its humor—but that's Nabokov for you, always tampering with and expanding the borders of his art, usually to the discomfort of his audience. It's almost a pity Lolita wasn't written 50 years before it's initial publication, because then it would have been banned, and people would actually have been shocked by its still largely taboo subject matter. As it is, the novel's current world-weary readership barely raises an eyebrow....which may be exactly the point.

Humbert Humbert comes to America from Europe and rents a room from Mrs. Haze, a widow with a beautiful 12-year-old daughter named Dolores. The girl's nickname is Lolita, a sultry name and one that foreshadows her seduction at the hands of Mr. Humbert—though he assures us, sometimes half-convincingly, that it was actually she who seduced him. The unfolding of their relationship, their journey of discovery across the American continent, and the final pitch-black spiral that culminates in an anti-climax of the first order are among the most famous in literature, and will remain so as long as detractors are unsuccessful in classifying this brilliant work of fiction as an "erotic novel." (They do so on the shakiest grounds—while Humbert and Lolita's relationship is highly sexual, Nabokov refrains from gratuitous or graphic depictions, certainly not salacious ones.)

Like any great work, Lolita can be interpreted many ways. On one hand, Humbert's flight from the old country to a new, supposedly more innocent, one is exemplified in his pursuit of the girl. Europe was in decay, America was coming into its own, but depsite the rhetoric of the day there was a darkness beneath the fresh youthful exterior that presaged imminent moral collapse. This is certainly an obvious reading, and one that academics like to write about, but this is ultimately a much more personal story, a human narrative far more relatable (if we're honest) than any of us wants to believe.

This is really a novel about sin and evil. Nabokov accomplishes the nearly impossible here—he makes us simultaneously abhor Humbert Humbert, and feel the deepest sympathy for the man, as though he really is the lamb at the mercy of wolves he portrays. We hate his corruption of Lolita, but we also hate it when things don't pan out for him, and instead of hating them both we take sides with Humbert against the vile Clare Quilty, legitimately one of literature's most disgusting figures. And this is the genius of the novel, that the way we feel about Humbert is really the way we feel about ourselves. We hate evil, especially evil that exists outside ourselves, but we go to great lengths to hide and even justify our own. We are all Humberts to some extent—hypocrites, liars, and more corrupt than even we are often aware of ourselves.

Review by C. Hollis Crossman
C. Hollis Crossman used to be a child. Now he's a husband and father who loves church, good food, and weird stuff. He might be a mythical creature, but he's definitely not a centaur. Read more of his reviews here.