Thought Portal

IS NABOKOV’S Lolita, a novel narrated by a child molester, still worth reading? With today’s focus on amplifying the voices of the victims of sexual assault, this old question looms with even greater urgency. The novel is especially unsettling in the current climate because it so successfully blurs the lines between fiction and reality, abuser and abused, and narrator and reader. Even Alfred Appel, a staunch defender of Nabokov, agrees that Humbert Humbert turns the reader into an “accomplice in both statutory rape and murder.”