Volume 45, Number 5 · March 26, 1998
Revisiting Lolita
By Michael Wood
Lolita
a film directed by Adrian Lyne
People reading Nabokov's Lolita for the first time are often baffled by their own reactions. Those who haven't read it for a while approach it again nervously, as if afraid of what they will learn about their old attitudes or their old selves. It's not just that the book, the story of the loves, travels, and undoing of Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze, a middle-aged European man and a twelve-year-old American girl, is funnier than it ought to be, and more cruel than we want it to be. Or that Humbert's tacky charm stretches much further than it has any right to. It's that we really don't know where we are: why we are laughing, what to do with our discomfort. There's also the sense that Lolita, the girl rather than the book, has become part of our language, the name of a condition. But do we know what that condition is?
Review, 6214 words
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