LOLITA IN THE AFTERLIFE
On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning With the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century
edited by Jenny Minton Quigley
A sparkling collection of essays about the controversial novel.
Lolita is personal for Minton Quigley, a writer, editor, and daughter of Walter Minton, the Putnam president who first published the novel in the U.S. in 1958. Like many of the contributors, actor Emily Mortimer wonders if a novel about the sexually explicit confessions of a middle-aged pedophile could be published today. In “Véra and Lo,” Stacy Schiff incisively explores the significant role of Nabokov’s wife, who “stood as the firewall between” her husband and Humbert Humbert in the book’s genesis and reception. Roxane Gay explores why Lolita, with its “tension between the beauty of the novel and the ugliness of its subject matter,” is a “book I love and hate in equal measure.” Crime novelist Laura Lippman writes that she’s “always approached Lolita as a detective story,” revealing Clare Quilty as “our culprit, hidden in plain sight.” Lauren Groff considers the “ways in which Nabokov sets out to seduce his readers,” and Sloane Crosley considers Lolita’s impact on popular culture. “In the new millennium,” she writes, “Lolita is a lazy euphemism for any relationship between a younger woman and an older man.” Jessica Shattuck gives voice to Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother, and Mary Gaitskill confronts the thorny issues of art, love, and morality. Zainab Salbi bemoans the situation of women in Iraq, where “Humbert Humbert is not some fictional character but a living one, and his right to have sex with underage girls is established both religiously and thus far politically.” Readers will also learn how Stanley Kubrick transformed the novel into what Tom Bissell describes as a “ferociously psychological” film and why, as Christina Baker Kline explains, we read Lolita for its language, characters, humor, pathos, and, yes, “its unsettling depiction of a sociopath.” Other contributors include Alexander Chee, Ian Frazier, Morgan Jerkins, Andre Dubus III, and Aleksandar Hemon.
A compendious, wide-ranging collection of sharp, thoughtful essays.