A modern Cinderella

Cleaning Nabokov's House, the 2011 novel by Leslie Daniels, amounts to a modern Cinderella story, although instead of a glass slipper there are, as Daniels tells us in the opening lines, a blue pot floating in a lake, a house where Vladimir Nabokov once lived, a book, a lawyer, a whorehouse, science and from there the world.

As the story opens Barb Barrett, pushing 40, has lost everything — her husband, her two children and her self-respect. She left her home of her own will and now cannot return. Her husband has already found another woman and has won custody of the children.

She finds herself living in a house where the author of Lolita once lived (as did the author herself, it turns out), and there she finds scraps of a novel, perhaps a draft written by Nabokov himself. The novel is about Babe Ruth, hardly a likely topic for the author more interested in butterflies than baseball. But perhaps he did write it. Can she turn the book into enough money to win back her children?

Barb does make enough money to resuscitate her life, but it comes not through the book but through that whorehouse. She notices that the town where she lives seems to be full of bored housewives, and so she hires college men to be her whores, who mostly just listen to the women talk. She manages to turn it into scientific research. The fact that the judge who decides her custody appeal has been one of her clients helps her win her case. And, yes, there is a charming prince.

As with Cinderella, not much here is convincing, yet readers get the happy ending they desire. And unlike Cinderella, this story is hilarious. Daniels is a wonderfully comic writer whose sentences dazzle. Yet I can find no trace of a second Leslie Daniels novel. Too bad.