Today I'm going to backtrack and talk about the book I've just finished rereading for maybe the 10th time. The book is Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, a book I first encountered as a young teenager, when my mother, who was working on her master's degree in English, was assigned it in a course. She was appalled by the novel but wouldn't tell me why. Naturally I gathered that sex had something to do with her creased brow, so I promptly read the book as soon as she wasn't looking. Sadly it was less prurient than I'd hoped, even to a girl with such modest expectations of prurience, mostly because . . . I mean, really, come on, be realistic: when the chief seducer's name is Humbert Humbert, the X-rated factor instantly assumes an entirely new algebraic significance.

Over the years, as I've returned to this novel, my sympathies have shifted back and forth among the central comedic tragedies: poor stupid awkward romantic H.H.; poor grubby rude shallow Lo; poor boring infatuated Charlotte. Clare Quilty is really the only character I can wholeheartedly dislike at every reading. If anyone deserves to be murdered by a gun named Chum, it's him.

But during this year's pass through the book, I found myself, for the first time, almost entirely distracted by Nabokov's wonderfully idiosyncratic control of the English language, especially as he superimposes it onto the American landscape of 194os teen culture, and midwestern motels, and suburban decor, and educational philistines:

We climbed long grades and rolled downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and spared slow children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black wiggles of curves on their yellow shields, and no matter how and where we drove, the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart of a magic carpet.

This is English, certainly, and beautifully grammatical to boot, but it's a strange comic terrible version of the language. When Humbert says, "I stopped [my car] in the shelter of the trees and abolished my lights to ponder the next move quietly," the verb abolished is both absolutely accurate and absolutely wrong; and this, I think, is why I find it so difficult, when reading the novel, to come to any settled conclusion about right and wrong, love and perversion: because the sentences themselves reinforce the conundrum of ambiguity with such exactness.

At the end of my edition of Lolita is a short essay by Nabokov: "On a Book Entitled Lolita." It's an enlightening piece, in more ways than one, and has a great deal to say about the creative itch, pornographic plot devices as not used in the novel, the "Literature of Ideas" as "topical trash," and so on. But toward the end he writes:

After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution "English language" for "romantic novel" would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch. None of my American friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength on my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

The ambiguous precision that this comment adds to an already ambiguous collation of precise sentences is more than I am able to parse on a bosky Sunday morning. Somebody in this house has to grocery-shop, and thus Lolita must scramble back onto the shelf and take care of herself as best she can. But if the language of the Russian novels is under better management than the language in this one, then they must be downright Shakespearean.