Lolita
Updated: Aug 8
One Friday morning, I was sitting outside, book in hand, when a neighbor passed by. “What are you reading,” he inquired. “Lolita,” I replied. There was a pause. I asked, “Do you know the story?” He didn’t and asked. I thought for a moment. “It’s about a pedophile.” Another pause, a blank stare. I continued, somewhat sheepishly, lest he be left with doubts about my character, “It’s considered one of the greatest books ever written …” And therein lies the complicated nature of this book, probably as complicated now as it was when initially published in 1955. Yes, Lolita is a story about a pedophile. More accurately, it’s a story by a pedophile, a confession as it were, but it’s also a desperate and maddening and tragic love story. A Vanity Fair quote from the back of the 50th Anniversary Edition boldly asserts, “The only convincing love story of our century.”
I’m not sure that’s exactly true, but it is true that our protagonist, debased, debauched, depraved Humbert Humbert (a pseudonym, like all the others, to protect the innocent) is desperately, maddeningly, and tragically in love with Dolores Haze, aka Dolly, aka Lo, aka Lolita, and there is very nearly nothing he won’t do to keep her once he’s got her or to get her back once he’s lost her. That all sounds very savage and, on one level, the whole sordid business is—remember, she's just twelve years old when their affair begins—but it must be noted that our Mr. H.H. is a gentleman through and through. He’s also a brute: a single-minded, single-purposed gentleman brute. In short, he’s terribly one-dimensional and perfectly predictable. Lolita is H.H.’s story, his version of events, in which he is the protagonist, the (anti)hero, and while he knows he’s flawed and has no illusions about who and what he is, he can’t, as all obsessives can’t, help but savor every moment, relish every detail, linger longingly, wistfully, rapturously, on every scene, nearly to the point of drowning the reader in a florid flood of exposition (as am I now). There were times when I said to myself, as you may now be saying to me, “Get on with it, man!”
At its core, Lolita is a story of possession or, at least, attempted possession. Humbert wants nothing more than to possess Lolita utterly, but the harder he tries (as he grows ever more desperate)—with gifts, with trips, with favors, with bribes—the more he fails; the more he fails, the harder still he tries. And the real genius of the book, perhaps the real genius of Nabokov, is that we never really know Lolita; we know her only as Humbert sees her. She is an enigma to us: we aren’t privy to her thoughts, her feelings, her motivations; no, we are in the dark about who she is, what she wants, or, in towering all-capital letters, how she is living with—surviving?—the reality she has found herself in. That mystery, that not knowing and desperately wanting to know, was, almost above all else, what kept me enthralled with the book, even while knowing, not certainly but almost certainly, that that unknown would never be known. Here, the old adage, however paraphrased, was never truer, “Always leave the reader wanting more.”
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