Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov

Not going to be carrying this one around in public.

I read a used, dog-eared copy of Lolita that I purchased at a local library sale for next to nothing. The very first thing I read colored my expectations quite strongly. It wasn't the first page, nor the title page, nor even the dedication. It was right smack on the cover, a quote from Vanity Fair celebrating the work:

"The only convincing love story of our century."

Knowing the premise of the book, I thought; "wow, I wonder how Nabokov is going to pull off telling a genuine love story between a pedophile and a preteen girl".

The answer is: He doesn't. Not at all. Because that's not what the book is about.

Either the Vanity Fair commenter is a complete nincompoop and somehow managed to read a saccharine love affair into this grotesquely creepy, savagely predatory account, or the commenter shares my opinion and the publisher put this quote on the cover with the intention of warping their readers' expectations. Because if this is a love story, it's a love story only in how much Humbert loves himself.

There are two things most readers already know about this book even before picking it up: 1) It's a controversial story about a pedophile and his affair with a 12-year old girl. And, 2) It's extraordinarily well-written. Both of these are true. I expected the twist to be that I would be made to sympathize with the narrator, Humbert Humbert, on some level or other. But I never found myself coming close to the point of sympathy. From the get-go, Humbert is a rather blatant psychopath. He reacts with complete nonchalance to a death early in the story, he casually plots to murder others throughout, and for the vast majority of the novel he cares little for Lolita herself beyond what she means to him. Humbert isn't a gray hero or even a pitiable villain. He exists in this story as little more than a vampire; some monster of the night who manages to get his fangs into poor Lolita and spends the rest of the story slowly sapping her; consuming her essence, wearing her out, and grinding her down to a nub. He cares to preserve her only for his own enjoyment, admitting frequently that once she grows, he'll no longer be enamored with her. Were he to lose her, he would care only insofar as the absence of her affects his own life. He's an utterly selfish, predatory scoundrel, and we're given no reason whatsoever to sympathize with him. Nabokov himself agreed with this view of his narrator, calling Humbert "a vain and cruel wretch" and "a hateful person" in the Paris Review in 1967.

Although it's undoubtedly ballsy to tell a story of a pedophile in the comparably conservative 1950s, the true accomplishment of Lolita isn't just its controversial premise. Lolita herself gets little of the spotlight. She has hardly any dialogue, and what we do hear of her often does little more than describe Humbert's borderline insane obsession with her as an angelic superbeing:

Lolita had been safely solipsized. The implied sun pulsated in the supplied poplars; we were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched her, rosy, gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight, unaware of it, alien to it, and the sun was on her lips, and her lips were apparently still forming the words of the Carmen-barmen ditty that no longer reached my consciousness.

In other, rarer episodes, the narrative depicts her as a rather typical young teenage girl; fawning over boys, playing tennis, sunbathing. For a love story to ring true, both characters must be genuine. No, Nabokov's real accomplishment in Lolita is the character of Humbert's unique voice and the quality of prose he uses to depict it. The character is so viscerally revolting that I found myself making cringing faces—almost subconsciously—while reading his words. And this isn't limited to Humbert's more overt displays of pedophilia. His worldview, his flamboyant way of speaking (particularly about himself), his dislike for the other people in the story, his single-minded obsession with possessing Lolita and the sociopathy he displays in its pursuit all qualify. He is a repulsive, disgusting character with no redeeming qualities. Reading Lolita is like reading a monster story from the point-of-view of the monster.

Vladimir Nabokov

And therein lies the twist. Lolita is colored with such odiousness by its narrator while simultaneously being one of the most gorgeous things I've ever read. Nabokov himself called Lolita "my love affair with the English language", and it shows. I don't believe I've ever read such consistently beautiful, fluid prose. Nabokov is at the peak of his powers as a writer, despite being confined with his second language—English—rather than his native Russian. Lolita is overly descriptive and undeniably flamboyant—indicative by itself of its narrator's high view on himself—but not so much so that it becomes over-the-top and a chore to read, like other writers who aspire to such high levels but succeed only in making their fiction an overly fatty, impenetrable mess. It rides along a narrow road and accomplishes both aesthetic beauty and consistency with its narrators voice. Additionally, Humbert's anti-social nature and cynical observations are often quite clever and darkly humorous. It seems that Nabokov succeeds in everything he intends to depict, despite comedy (especially dark comedy) being exceedingly hard to produce on the written page.

Such quality often carries the book as it stumbles onward through some dry spells in which nothing much is happening. Were it anybody else writing this story, I'd probably have set it down during one of two road trips in which we spend dozens of pages reading not much more than Humbert's obsessive fawning over his victim. Humbert is detestable, but Nabokov's talent as a writer keeps him from weighing too heavily on us as we read. Some of the stress incurred from reading such a putrid human being is dissipated by Nabokov's deft use of gallows humor through the work. Aside from Nabokov's colorful descriptions of Americana, there's not much to these passages in which Humbert and Lolita simply dip between motels. But these sections often feature depictions of the American west that are so gorgeous they're often worth the price of admission just by themselves, absent of any context:

And as we pushed westward, patches of what the garage-man called “sage brush” appeared, and then the mysterious outlines of table-like hills, and then red bluffs ink-blotted with junipers, and then a mountain range, dun grading into blue, and blue into dream, and the desert would meet us with a steady gale, dust, gray thorn bushes, and hideous bits of tissue paper mimicking pale flowers among the prickles of wind-tortured withered stalks all along the highway; in the middle of which there sometimes stood simple cows, immobilized in a position (tail left, white eyelashes right) cutting across all human rules of traffic.

Man, just look at that. I'd read Nabokov describing almost anything—it's stunning.

I knew quite a bit about this book before I ever read a page. And I had pretty high expectations from it. It managed to meet those while also surprising me a bit. It's extraordinarily written, it says important things and made me think deeply about its themes, and it imparted on me life experience I'd never have gained otherwise. It challenged me with a deep, genuine character whose beliefs and experiences attacked my own with each page.

All of these things are why I read fiction, and so Lolita succeeds.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐