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On the book

On Lyne's adaptation

Selected Readings

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what is it?

Lolita flirts with the shabby.  Humbert Humbert, our amused, enchanting, degenerate narrator, floats over bright middlebrow America:  hotels in dizzying variations (some magical, some funny, some both), rundown suburbia, summer camps, book clubs, theatre with Meaning, rivers of candy, seas of soft drinks, tourist traps, kitsch decorations, murder banal, murder as slapstick, magazine ads, prescription drug abuse, and twisted variants on road-buddy conventions ("'Drive on,' my Lo cried shrilly. / 'Righto.  Take it easy.' (Down, poor beast, down.)"), and worse (and horrifying and funny) variants on now-common dysfunctional family accounts (Know Your Daughter) -- all as backdrop for a tragic, absurd affair.

Lolita isn't a love story and it isn't a cautionary tale.  It thrills, it delights, it fulfills its prefacer's promise of a morally apotheotic ending (with no apothecary in sight) -- it can be heartwrenchingly cruel at times.  It is, to paraphrase a critic's comment on Kurt Vonnegut, the saddest of funny stories or the funniest of sad stories.

And much has been made of  its pedophilia. 

The novel's namesake is 12 and bullied into sex with her late mother's widow, the very evil, very charming Humbert Humbert. The novel shocks without resorting to profanity or to pornographic conventions. (The latter, though, are lampooned to great effect.)

The shock comes from our narrator's oily presentation:  mostly, from his gleeful, enthusiastic, entirely sensual appreciation of some sexually precocious prepubescent girls (dubbed therein "nymphets" -- Webster's and the porn business and the rest of us have taken up the term from the novel). The reader is almost forced to feel pity for "poor" (the narrator's adjective of choice for himself) Humbert Humbert. A second or third reading glints a hard light on the horrible actions of our narrator (who brushes off astonishing cruelty with contempt, or glosses it over with a joke) but, at first blush, Lolita doesn't seem to put enough weight on the amorality of sexual abuse -- a careful reading shows a clear condemnation, but there's enough pathos and humor to waylay the question, said question not truly relating to art anyway. 

Halfway through a fifth reading of the novel (in the summer of 1997)  I found out that a film version of Lolita had been made and that it was running into all sorts of distribution troubles. 

What, exactly, is so shocking about Lolita? 

While what triggered the scandal is obvious, I keep thinking of other writers who were also breaking taboos in the mid-fifties -- most sank without a trace of indignation, and the ones that didn't have been bobbing in calm waters, floating atop whatever was objectionable to begin with; they have joined the realm of the domestic. Tamed by respectability or scholasticism, they faded from the collective imagination, all those worried faces and those damp angry books.

Not Lolita. Not Nabokov.

What is it about Lolita that made it so hot? Why is it still a hot potato? What's baffling me has little to do with the book and more with what's around it.

I'm puzzled by the apparent break between what's going on in the public's mind and the novel proper. The novel is very good -- crisp, generous, emotional, and cerebral -- but Lolita seems to exist outside it, much like Don Quixote, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Nathanael West's failed screenwriter, and that codpieced ultraviolencer, Alex (also celluloided by Kubrick).

Why Lolita? Why Lolita?

I'm still waiting for an answer.

almost there: thoughts on lyne's lolita

(This review originally appeared in Savoy Magazine. © 1998 J. M. Martinez)

Books are books, and movies are movies — perfectly good movies have been made out of bad books, and vice versa. There is very little common ground between the two media. Film presents experience head-on, while literature can only give its audience what John Barth calls “the experiencing of experience,” which is a wonderful way to sum up the obvious. The best thing about any novel is modulating an aesthetic event, transmogrifying signs and symbols into the mental equivalents of their real-life referents. Which is both a mouthful and way too involved for something this obvious.

Here’s an example. In Dumbo there is a wonderful scene involving pink elephants whereas, in this paragraph, there is only the phrase “pink elephants.” The viewer has been given a pink elephant in the movie, but here the reader is made to imagine a pink elephant, or at least remember the pink elephant from the movie. If he or she has not seen the movie, then there is the additional task of both speculating as to how the animators might have drawn a pink elephant and as to how a real-life elephant (most likely culled from a nature documentary) would look, if it were pink. The process is much more involved when it comes to literature, which is why most of us, I included, watch more television than we read books.

Enough. Don’t think about pink elephants.

Lolita is about an older man falling in love with a young girl. It is also director’s Adrian Lyne’s best movie — there is a little less camera fetishism here, less of the artsy touches that made 9 and ½ Weeks and Flashdance almost unwatchable. Also almost gone is the director’s obsession with ceiling fans and other revolving objects through which shafts of light break out.

The movie begins with an uncomfortably glossy preface on young love. Although handled tastefully, with practically no nudity, there’s much in it that could have been used for a music video from the 80s — golden haze, white linen backdrop, a beach.

The rest of the movie sporadically dips back into this kind of Lynecism, but not often and never as bluntly (most irritating is that neon blue gel meant to suggest night). The characters take over. The story — horrific, funny, often both — unfolds quickly and neatly, folding itself into its components, tragedy slipping into farce and stumbling, again, into tragedy. This Lolita is like a spiral staircase (another stock Lyne image, while we’re at it). It isn’t shocking. There is neither the shock of truly good cinema nor of the one you thought of first.

Very few scenes show nudity. And when it happens it is the right sort of nudity, by which I mean necessary, remote, aphrodisiac, and appalling. And it isn’t a fifteen-year-old girl on the screen either, but a body-double or (and here I withdraw “aphrodisiac” from my previous sentence) Frank Langella.

The story: Humbert Humbert rooms with one Charlotte Haze, whom he marries to be closer to Charlotte’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Dolores. Dolores is alternatively known as Lo, Dolly, Lola, and Lolita. She is in Humbert’s parlance a nymphet, which Webster’s defines as “a sexually precocious pubescent” H.H., much more vividly, calls a nymphet a “demon child”. Through circumstances I won’t mention (lest I spoil the movie for plot-fiends), H.H.’s dreams come true — that is, he takes full and total control of Lo. The expected romps take place. Whatever joy H.H. might draw from the relationship is quickly sucked away, and the pedophile is left scrambling for some sort of power. Worse, he is trapped in a car, driving from no particular destination to another, with a teenager. Worst, he is being chased by Frank Langella. Maybe. He’s not sure.

Jeremy Irons is very good as Humbert — he looks sublimely uncomfortable (and well he should). The character is a charming mix of wit, deviousness, and klutziness. Dominique Swain plays the nymphet. Lolita is both manipulator and victim - one trait feeds off the other, and Swain handles the uneasy balance well. Most of the joy and the humor in the film springs from her, with Irons playing a tortured and delighted straight man. And Frank Langella does a fantastic job at being totally evil, even when wearing no clothes.

Lolita is one of my favorite novels. Vladimir Nabokov, its author, is certainly my favorite writer. That said, I was a bit disappointed by how faithful screenwriter Stephen Schiff (a former New Yorker writer) was to the book. Scenes and dialogue have been lifted almost straight from the text, which of course is great but leaves out the most important element in the batch, the prose itself.

Some of the puns made it to the screen. Some were left dangling - Lo mentions Hourglass Lake in the movie. In the novel, Humbert mistakes it for “Our Glass Lake”, and takes it as a gesture of intimacy. All but a few crumbs of the wordplay remain, but the crumbs are well used.

Lolita is a great novel. The movie is good. It isn’t vulgar and it isn’t fluff. There are genuine stylistic flourishes. There are very moving moments and very funny moments.

There is not enough of either, however, to make the movie anything but a worthy effort at translating into another medium a novel whose heart and soul, its inner workings, rely on the written word, and on references to other works of literature. There is not, for example, a real cinematic equivalent for the shades of Poe that haunt the novel. Nor for the duplicity of our narrator, Humbert Humbert. Film is straightforward. What you see is what you get.

Just ask Frank Langella.

selected readings

The material I've found most helpful in approaching Lolita were the pertinent chapters of Brian Boyd's The American Years, the second volume in the authoritative Nabokov biography.  Also helpful (but somewhat distracting and to be avoided on first approaching Lo) is Alfred Appel's annotated edition of the novel. 

More fun is Martin Amis' foreword to the Everyman's Library edition, which juggles humor (I think I stole that road-buddy line from him) and insight -- he zeroes in on Nabokov's contempt for and honest portrayal of cruelty in the novel.  The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov has one good article on Lolita (by Professor Ellen Pifer), but is also full of better tangential stuff ("Lolita in Russian," "Nabokov and Poe," and "'Poshlost'," to name three).

the lo-shop

B O O K S
  • Lolita
    By Vladimir Nabokov.
    Paperback. Vintage International edition, $10.40

  • Lolita
    By Vladimir Nabokov. Introduction by Martin Amis.
    Hardcover. Everyman's Library edition, $11.90

  • Lolita: A Janus Text
    By Vladimir Nabokov.
    Paperback. Twayne's Masterwork Studies edition, $18.00

  • Lolita: A Janus Text
    By Vladimir Nabokov.
    Hardcover. Twayne's Masterwork Studies edition, $29.00

  • The Annotated Lolita
    By Vladimir Nabokov. With notes by Alfred Appel, Jr.
    Paperback. Vintage Books edition, $15.20

  • Lolita: A Screenplay
    By Vladimir Nabokov. His original screenplay for the Stanley Kubrick film.
    Paperback. Vintage Books edition, $9.60

  • Lolita (Bfi Film Classics)
    By Richard Corliss. A short, funny analysis of the Stanley Kubrick film.
    Paperback. British Film Institute edition, $8.76

  • Lolita: The Book of the Film
    By Stephen Schiff. The screenplay to the Adrian Lyne film.
    Paperback. Applause Theatre Book edition, $12.76

  • Lolita
    By Edward Albee. His stage adaptation of the novel.
    Paperback. Dramatist's Play Service edition, $7.60

A U D I O

  • Lolita
    The novel as read by Jeremy Irons, who played Humbert Humbert in Adrian Lyne's film adaptation.
    Unabridged. Audio cassette, $31.96.

  • Lolita
    The novel as read by James Mason, who played Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation.
    Abridged. Audio cassette, $9.60.

  • Lolita & Poems
    Excerpts from the novel and a few poems, read by Vladimir Nabokov.
    (Listed as out of stock.) Audio cassette. Spoken Arts edition.

  • Lolita: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1962
    Music composed by Nelson Riddle for the Stanley Kubrick film.
    CD. Wea/Atlantic/Rhino edition, $12.99.

  • Lolita: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1998
    Music composed by Ennio Morricone for the Adrian Lyne film.
    CD. BMG/Milan edition, $12.99.

V I D E O

  • Lolita, 1962
    Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation, with Peter Sellers, James Mason, and Sue Lyons.
    VHS. Warner Home Video edition, $16.99.

  • Lolita, 1962
    Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation, with Peter Sellers, James Mason, and Sue Lyons.
    DVD. Warner Home Video edition, $17.49.

  • Lolita, 1997
    Adrian Lyne's film adaptation, with Jeremy Irons, Melanie Griffith, and Dominique Swain.
    VHS. Vidmark / Trimark edition, $10.49.

  • Lolita, 1997
    Adrian Lyne's film adaptation, with Jeremy Irons, Melanie Griffith, and Dominique Swain.
    DVD. Vidmark / Trimark edition, $14.99.

  • Nabokov on Kafka
    Christopher Plummer plays Vladimir Nabokov in an adaptation from Lectures on Literature
    VHS. $20.99

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© 1999 - 2001
Last Updated 21 March 2001
Created and Maintained by J.M. Martinez

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