Review by Edward Tanguay November 25, 1997

Nabokov writes prose the only way
it should be written, that is, ecstatically. -- John Updike

Nabakov's writing is tremdenous. His his control of the language (English is not his native language?) is first class. I had the feeling that whimsical and fleeting thoughts I have had for a mere moment once in my life, he corners and fully exposes with his absolute mastery of the language.

As far as his descriptions, he has a William-Buckley grip and flair on describing situations involving people less intelligent than he. His break up with Valechka was priceless. Nabakov uses his wide artillery of language to reduce people to bumbling duds:

She was now preening herself, between him and me, rouging her pursed lips, tripling her chin to pick at her blouse-bosom and so forth, and he spoke of her as if she were absent, and also as if she were a kind of little ward that was in the act of being transferred, for her own good, from one wise guardian to antoher even wiser one; and although my helpless wrath may have exaggerated and disfigured certain impressions, I can swear that he actually consulted me on such things as her diet, her periods, her wardrobe and the books she had read or should read. "I think," he said, "she will like Jean Christophe?" Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich.

A wonderfully honest Greek sense of bodily beauty. A relief from our PC world.

The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pigfaces, evoked even less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had. Nymphets do not occur in polar regions.

There is energy in this book. It is bacchanalian. It is a rush.

My favorite descriptions:

I felt a Dostoevskian grin dawning.

She showed a fierce insatiable curiosity for my past.

Beale, the fellow who eliminated my wife

With his hummingbird pencil deftly and delicately flying from one point to another

luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes

I could of course visualize Lolita with hallucinational lucidity.

a lanky, six-foot, pale boy with an active Adam's apple

Lincoln's home, largelyspurious,with parlor books and period furniture thatmost visitors reverently accepted as personal belongings.

I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.

I remember one matinee in a small airless theatre crammed with children and reeking with the hot breath of popcorn.

I realized I was the only shopper in that rather eerie place where I moved about fishlike, in a glaucous aquarium.

I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games.

Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?

And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency,mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream.

I remember as a child in Europe gloating over a map of North America that had "appalachian Mountinas" boldly running from Alabama up to New Brunswick, so that the whole region they spanned--Tennessee, the Virginias, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, appeared to my imagination as a gigantic Switzerland or even Tibet, all mountain, glorious diamond peak upon peak, giant conifers, le montagnard emigre in his bear skin glory, and Felis tigris goldsmithi, and Red Indians under the catalpas. That it all boiled down to a measly suburban lawn and a smoking garbage incinerator, was appalling.

An example of his dry humor is his description upon entering a hotel room:

There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, a closet door with mirror, a bathroom door ditto, a blue-dark window, a refleted bed there, the same in the closet mirror, two chairs, a glass-topped table, two bedtables, a double bed: a big panel bed, to be exact, with a Tuscan rose chenille spread, and two frilled, pink-shaded nightlamps, left and right.

And of trying to sleep in the hotel room:

There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashinoned, homey place--"gracious living" and all that stuff. The clatter of the elevator's gate--some twenty yards northeast of my head but as clearly perceived as if it were inside my left temple--alternated with the banging and booming of the machine's various evolutions and lasted well beyond midnight. Every now and then, immediately east of my left ear, the corridor would brim with cheerful, resonant and inept exclamations ending in a volley of good-nights. When that stopped, a toilet immediatly north of my cerebellum took over. It was a manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet, and it was used many times. Its gurgle and gush and long afterflow shook the wall behind me. Then someone in a southern direction was extravagantly sick, almost coughing out his life with his liquor, and his toilet descended like a veritable Niagara, immediatly beyond our bathroom. And when finally all the waterfalls had stopped, and the enchanted hunters were sound asleep, the avenue under the window of my insomnia, to the west of my wake--a staid, eminently residential, dignified alley of huge trees--degenerated into the despicable haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night.

Where does he get his precision?

I was not able, alas, to hold my breakfast, but dismissed that physicality was a trivial contretemps,wiped my mouth with a gossamer handkerchief produced from my sleeve, and, with a blue block of ice for heart,a pill on my tongue and solid death in my hip pocket, I stepped neatly into a telephone booth in Coalmont (Ah-ah-ah, said its little door) and rang up the only Schiller--Paul, Furniture--to be found in the battered book. Hoarse Paul told me he did know a Richard, the son of a cousin of hi, and his address was, let me see, 10 Killer Street (I am not going very far for the pseudonyms). Ah-ah-ah, said the little door.

A nondescript cur came out from behind the house, stopped in surprise, and started good-naturedly woof-woofing at me, his eyes slit, his shaggy belly all muddy, and then walked about a little and woofed once more.

. . . before I drove to whereever the beasts's lair was--and then pulled the pistol's foreskin back, and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger.

But my heart pounded with tiger joy, and I crunched acocktail glass underfoot.

"Quilty," I said, "I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you."

I could not bring myself to touch him in order to make sure he was really dead. He looked it: a quarter of his face gone, and two flies beside themselves with a dawning sense of unbelievable luck. (!)

Passing through a red light was like a sip of forbidden Burgundy when I was a child.

And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themsevles into limbless monsters of pain.

I was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.

He loves language. He loves description. He refers to himself and other people with numerous names. Language is formost in this book, it is a celebration of description of this infatuation with Lolita. ("But I am no poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder".) He loves words ("and the vulgar vocabulary--'revolting,' 'super,' 'luscious,' 'goon,' 'drip' that Lolita would lose forever"). Of this style, there is a one word to describe it: control.

He knows what he wants. He's real. He's true. His "desperate honesty" speaks with a resounding confidence his this book. Although the narrator argues his "innocence by poetry" ("The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets--not crime's prowling ground.")  I like how he speaks to the reader as if you are a partner in his crime ("But now listen to what happened next.") That the whole book is written from prison, and the intermittant references to the gun, is a nice way to suggest the end to which all these actions will indubitally lead.  It foreshadows his fate.

What is the movie like? How could they duplicate the linguistic mastery of this book? I would think that if any movie of this book was any good, it would have to be good on some other terms (showing good flesh maybe?), since film simply cannot carry the excellence of description in the same way that language, i.e. Nabokov's language, can. Or can it?

Then, as I drove away, I heard her shout in a vibrant voice to her Dick; and the dog started to lope alongside my car like a fat dolphin, but he was too heavy and old, and very soon gave up. And presently I was driving though the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshiled wipers in full action but unable tocope wiht my tears.

Although I have a sense that it is true, I am still trying to figure out what Vanity Fair meant by this book being "The only convincing love story of our century." But you must agree, this is the language of love:

I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part ou nous ne serons jamais separes; Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn--even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the ere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.

As you begin the story, you feel that you are slowly surveying the landscape of a huge, huge iceberg, with 90% still to come, and not belonging to the daylight.

The narrator has a moral sense of (perverted?) beauty. That he can have his little nymph and ravage her in the name of aesthetic necessity and let her essence pump his being up with life and energy, this is the only moral issue in the world for him, and he answers it with every action and word: yes, Lolita, Lolita, he can't get enough. The philosophical question in this book, if there is one, is whether there is moral plane above pure beauty:

Unless it can be proven to me--to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction -- that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative ofarticulate art. To quote an old poet; Themoral sense inmortals is theduty We hafve to pay on mortal senseof beauty.

True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work. There is a "desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning."  He is still an awful guy.  But are there instances when the necessity of art and beauty cancels all out?  One pays the price, I suppose, in any culture.

Nabakov is a genius.  His thinking goes deep.  He is an author who can handle a topic such as child pornography well. He has insights into our culture:

. . . There are at least three themes which are utterly taboo as far as most American publishers are concerned: The two others are: a Negro-White marriage which is a complete and glorious success resulting in lots of children and grandchildren; and the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106.

I want to read more Nabakov.

Edward Tanguay

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