How to even begin to review the highly controversial, amazingly written, acclaimed novel by Russian-American author Vladimir Nobokov? 

 

For those who don't know, Lolita is a first person account, as a memoir, of a man using a pseudonym "Humbert Humbert" who falls in love with Dolores, the 12-year-old daughter of his tenant, Charlotte Haze.  Charlotte falls in love with him, and even though he's personally disgusted by her, marries her so that he can secretly infatuate himself over Dolores - and potentially find a way to become sexual with her.  Charlotte later discovers Humbert's diary where he describes his love for Dolores, who he begins to call "Lolita" his "nymphet", and his aversions to Charlotte.  Despite his protests that his diary is merely notes for a book, Charlotte flees from their home with written letters to her friends warning them of Humbert and his bad intentions with her daughter.  However, Charlotte is hit by a car and killed.  Humbert collects her notes and burns them. 

 

He picks up Dolores, who is away at camp, and explains to her that her mother has become seriously ill.  They embark on a road trip where Humbert bribes her for sexual favors.  After traveling and staying in hotels for a while, they eventually settle down in a New England town.  Humbert becomes her adoptive father, and he becomes very controlling of her relationships and extracurricular activities.   Because of this, their relationship becomes contentious and Dolores runs off after an argument with Humbert.  When Humbert finds her at a nearby store, D0lores convinces him to take her on another road trip.  In Colorado, Humbert takes Dolores to a nearby hospital after she becomes sick.  She is secretly checked out of the hospital by someone unbeknownst to Humbert.  Despite searching frenetically for Dolores for a couple years, Humbert comes up empty and gives up the search.  Depressed and defeated, he settles for a relationship with an alcoholic named Rita. 

 

After a few years he receives a letter from Dolores who is now married and pregnant with a man named Richard.  He learns she was picked up at the hospital by a pornographic producer named Quilty who rejected Dolores's love because she wouldn't star in one of his films.  Humbert soon tracks down and finds Dolores at Richard's home.  Humbert implores her to leave Richard and come with her but she refuses his request.  After their encounter, he finds Quilty and shoots him multiple times with a pistol.  Humbert is arrested for murder.  Dolores dies not longer after, during childbirth.

 

This basic synopsis presented above of a rather simple premise and plot doesn't do the story the justice it deserves, both from the literary perspective, or with regards to the controversy it stirred up.  From the latter point, yes, it's not hard to glean from the novel why it's controversial.  Nobokov's novel was written in 1955, so what was the general consensus on Humbert's sexual deviancy back then?  Honestly, I don't really care, nor do I need to look up statutory laws during that time period and compare them to today. 

 

In general, and especially today, people look down upon sex with minors - and for obvious reasons.  Kids can't process emotions, experiences, and physical encounters the same way adults can.  Hell, today it seems like people don't even start to get their shit together until about 25, particularly for men who have more luxury to postpone responsibility and mental development until, well, I suppose they make it into the ground for good as a gaunt corpse with a lived legacy of Fortnite kills, roach clips, and empty hard seltzer cans.  From a cultural relativists perspective, and from a historical perspective, we can find examples, (if we want to humor ourselves) of marriages in the early teens, and child rearing not long after - sure.  And sure, we can argue that everyone develops differently both physically and mentally.  Some teens have emotional maturity greater than some old folks I've met, and some old folks I've met never seemed to get passed 6th grade, maybe because of early crystalized trauma or a life path of fear, junk food, and atrophying comforts.  

 

But in current western culture, we've collectively set limits legally and socially as to what's acceptable.  We all assume and act as though they are reasonable, and for the most part they are.  I think back to when I was in high school and how I was with relationships and personal introspection.  I was confused, very sensitive, somewhat shy, and rather reckless.  I wasn't ready to be married or have kids.  Everyone around me, then, would have chuckled at the very notion.  We aren't living in the ice ages anymore where by age 12 we need to learn to hunt prairie bison with our battle-scarred fathers.  The kid-to-adult curve has stretched out because of changing social-culture and technology.  

 

Today, when we age and mature like normal adults are supposed to age and mature, we see teenagers for what they are - still kids growing up and figuring things out, sensitive to their surroundings, and absorbing experiences and internalizing every slight like water on dry clay.  They must be protected and nurtured to a level, and challenged to the degree it fosters positive growth and strengthening, not destruction, cowering, or emotional dissolution.

 

In short, we can all agree Humbert was a creepo.  By the end of the novel, even though he was the protagonist, his life ended in misery on trial, and tragedy with the death of Dolores.  The story never attempts to condone anything or make us feel any extra sympathy for Humbert and his perverted thoughts and actions.  The reader never feels like Nobokov was particularly rooting for his protagonist, either.  From the author's own mouth, he stated in an interview,  "Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real."

 

In a way then, the author seems to have written an escapist novel, a kind of vanity project to satiate a desire to push the boundaries of fine prose, literary composition, and taboo subject matter.  If those were his goals, I believe most people would say that he achieved them.  Lolita, despite it's contemptable main character, has transcendent prose throughout.  Take this following passage, for example, "At night, tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful giant Christmas trees, loomed in the darkness and thundered by the belated little sedan.  And again next day a thinly populated sky, losing its blue to the heat, would melt overhead, and Lo would clamor for a drink, and her cheeks would hollow vigorously over the straw, and the car inside would be a furnace when we got in again, and the road shimmered ahead, with a remote car changing its shape mirage-like in the surface glare, and seeming to hang for a moment, old-fashionably square and high, in the hot haze.  And as we pushed westward, patches of what the tedious 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 a 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."  Passages like this flow throughout Nabokov's seminal work and elevate the reader's attention beyond some of the more challenging scenarios.   

For some, Lolita is the best of all novels, or close to, for it's challenging taboo subject matter, story, and immaculate prose.  For others, an abomination that deserves condemnation as glorified kid-porn.  Perhaps the controversy has contributed in part to the lasting significance and pop culture relevance, despite the novel being written in 1955.  Sometimes, novels come out at the right time for their message, or their controversy - I suspect Lolita's publication date may have benefitted from certain social conditions.  I can't deny the strength of the writing though, either, as Nabokov is arguable in the same conversation as Woolf and Faulkner, writers with their own stylistic mastery of the craft.

 

Summary:  Some will love it for its prose, others will loathe it for its subject matter, but this masterfully written escapist novel will leave few readers without a strong emotional impression.

 

Rating:  6.5

 

-E.B.  2023-05-21