Katie read and liked David's review of Lolita (Penguin Modern Classics):

"Lolita is a road novel, but its kind of the anti-On The Road (it was published in 1955, two years before Kerouac’s breakout book). Humbert Humbert and Sal Paradise travel some of the same roads, around the same time, but rather than some holy quest...more Lolita is a road novel, but its kind of the anti-On The Road (it was published in 1955, two years before Kerouac’s breakout book). Humbert Humbert and Sal Paradise travel some of the same roads, around the same time, but rather than some holy quest through sanctified towns in search of enlightenment and kicks, Humbert’s is a furtive, illicit journey through a bland, tacky, ephemeral, clumsily commercialized landscape. On the other hand, both Sal and Humbert are bohemians of sorts, and both cast a jaundiced eye at 50’s conformity and conventionality. In Humbert’s eyes, Dolly suffers as much from being an ordinary American adolescent in a tabloid culture as from being the victim of a pedophile. In his twisted view he’s improving her mind while corrupting her morals. But unlike Sal/Kerouac’s celebration of America’s cities and backroads, Humbert’s is a snobbish, jaundiced, extremely unromantic view of the American landscape and 50’s culture.

Lolita is also a book about the expressive possibilities of the English language. In a trite sense this is true of every novel ever written in English. They are all on some level about what you can do, and can fail to do, with the English language. But English was Nabokov’s second language (at least!), and English itself is more of a theme in this novel than it would be were the novel written by a native speaker. Humbert is something of a pedant, and the reader is dazzled by his exuberant and playful use of the language. I guess it goes to the whole outsider theme: Humbert as a cultured, old world European looking askance at 50’s culture; Humbert the nonnative speaker become hyperliterate in his second language; Humbert the pedophile with a more meta understanding of the taboo against sex with children than people who’ve simply internalized it. It’s in the nature of taboos that one refrains from reflecting on them.

And that’s the genuinely disturbing thing about this novel: you willingly spend 300 pages inside the head of a charming psychopath for whom the taboo against sex with children is just an arbitrary social proscription (Humbert briefly recounts historical examples in which the proscription did not exist, and remarks upon the arbitrariness of the various statutory definitions of where the line is drawn). Humbert is repulsive, but you can’t feel superior to him because he’s smarter and more self-aware than you are. Without at all condoning his acts, you begin to see things his way, even though you never really lose sight of Humbert’s massive blind spot: the inability to see that sex with a child violates a sacred trust—that adults will treat children as ends rather than means—and forces the child to experience a reality they are not yet emotionally equipped for. In some ways I suppose Humbert is a precursor to Hannibal Lecter, although while Lecter arguably does more despicable things—kills people and eats them—Humbert is a far more disturbing character.
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