Thirty views of Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita continues to generate strong feelings and strong opinions well over half a century after its publication in 1958. People love and revile the novel (and its author), and sometimes they are even the same people, as we see in the new collection of 30 essays, Lolita in the Afterlife.

This book is edited by Jenny Minton Quigley, who just happens to be the daughter of Walter Minton, the man who first dared to publish Lolita in the United States. Even though the essay writers tend to quote the same lines from the novel, the lines those of us who have read it are most likely to remember, the essays themselves are quite different.

Emily Mortimer, who starred in a movie about Lolita (The Bookshop), writes about how funny the book is and how that humor helped made it more acceptable to readers and able to avoid legal challenges. Mystery novelist Laura Lippman views the novel as a detective story. Stacy Schiff looks at it from the point of view of Nabokov's wife, who defended Lolita while considering Tom Sawyer unfit for young readers. Ian Frazier examines Lolita as a road novel and a celebration of the motels once found along Route 66 and other American highways.

Kira von Eichel writes about some 200 popular songs that mention Lolita. Robin Givhan talks about the character's influence on fashion. Others comment on the various paperback covers, which sexualize the young girl perhaps more than the novel itself does, and the two movies adapted from the book.

Several of the female essay writers tell of reading Lolita while in their early teens and identifying with the girl, imaging themselves being so admired and lusted after by older men. Reading the novel years later, they seem a bit embarrassed and shocked by their earlier attitudes. Not only have they changed, but the times have changed. Many question whether Lolita could even be published today.

In one of the more perceptive essays, Claire Dederer puts Humbert Humbert in his place as an "anti-monster" who is as "ordinary as dust." There are a lot of men out there like that. He just writes better than most. Erika L. Sanchez, with perhaps the lamest essay in the book, takes this same argument too far, saying the novel is a study in "white male entitlement," as if men of color (and women) have not sexually abused children. 

One thing that surprises me about this collection is how few of the essayists — while they all seem to admire the book despite their misgivings about it — comment in detail about its value as a work of literature. Fortunately Andre Dubus III covers this subject very well.