Thoughts on Lolita

I grew up in an environment in which fiction was not much read. Sure, I was exposed to the usual Dr. Seuss fare normally given to beginning readers, but even in my earliest acquaintance with books, I was given biographies, histories, and, of course, Bible stories. I did go through one phase, lasting two years, which, because our television broke and my father refused to replace the devilish device, involved my reading every Hardy Boys and Tom Swift novel ever written. In high school, we hardly did any serious reading, and at home my nightstand featured Ironside’s Bible commentaries.

I was not exposed to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The subject matter would have been unmentionable, and the novel itself considered obscene. As I grew older, and increasingly more open-minded, one might even say, “liberal,” I never really wanted to read the book because it sounded “sick”—filled with perverted fantasies about middle-aged men having sex with pubescent girls—and I was increasingly aware of the degree to which young girls, many more than I would have thought, suffer some kind of sexual exploitation before reaching adulthood. My loyalties to the woman who had suffered such exploitations made the novel seem completely unappealing.

But, because I wanted to read Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, I picked up a copy of Lolita a couple of weeks ago, and, at the age of forty—a contemporary of Nabokov’s narrator—I dove into the novel, finishing it on Holy Saturday after grabbing snatches of it between Palm Sunday services, scheduling acolytes, and writing two homilies.

What first grabbed me was the remarkably expressive prose that carefully observed not only “Humbert Humbert’s” unstable and demented psychological state, but the most mundane, but life-giving details of everyday suburban life. Nabokov manages to draw the reader into the situation and mind set of the narrator without ever making him truly sympathetic. We see that he is a selfish, obsessive creep who seems to be unable, or unwilling, to respond appropriately to the young girl in his charge.

But the book is also driven by a compelling plot. I’ve never heard this novel described this way, but Nabokov creates so much tension, and foreshadows so deftly, that Lolita becomes a real page turner. I could not put it down.

Is this book obscene? No. A friend of mine asked me, when I was only through the first part, if I would “be honest” and admit that it was kind of a “turn on.” She had not read the novel, but she assumed that Nabokov must be working in the familiarly pornographic realm and that the novel plays to some kind of twisted, but, ubiquitous male fantasy. But it does not. The reader hoping for a salacious narrative will be sorely disappointed by Lolita.

Furthermore, the narrator gives us plenty of chances to glimpse the destructiveness of Humbert’s behavior. Following his first sexual encounter with Dolores he says she suddenly seems like a “ghost.” Throughout we see glimpses of her pain. At one point she tells him, “He broke my heart . . . you broke my life.” Then there is the heart-rending thirty-second chapter of part two in which the narrator confesses that there was more than ample evidence of the deep pain Dolores was experiencing.

This is a novel that will stick with me for a long time. I’m haunted by the revelation, in the “forward,” that Mrs. Richard F. Schiller “died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest.” H.H. had hoped Mrs. Schiller would have a boy, but instead she gives birth to a dead girl, a symbol of the living death men continue to inflict on young girls.

It is this dead girl that will haunt me. She haunts me because I have seen her sisters. I see them all around me. They are women whose uncles, fathers, brothers, neighbors, clergymen, and stepfathers have broken their lives. With all of these wounded women walking around, I wonder where their persecutors are. Do I recognize them when I see them? Who are these demons that walk among us? Can we tell who they are, or do we only see the ghosts they make—ghosts that are all, in a way, the same ghost--the ghost of Lolita?