By the end of that first day of reading, I was suffused with disgust: at Humbert, at Nabokov, and most of all at what I saw as the one-dimensional depiction of the girl in the book. Lolita was not what I thought of as a real character, and her failure to materialize made me angry. My response was emotional: I was sad about Lolita’s absence from Lolita. The question I didn’t ask: why had Nabokov disappeared her?
