Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense (Princeton University Press), by Robert Alter

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When most people think of Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita flashes to mind. The Russian émigré’s most notorious novel occupies one chapter in a compact but well-reasoned appreciation of Nabokov by Robert Alter. As scholar, critic and translator, Alter is one of America’s most distinguished persons of letters. His primary task in Nabokov and the Real World is to dismantle the widely-echoed theory of critics who accuse Nabokov of playing an elaborate literary game—a set of stylistic maneuvers, mannered, overwrought and arch.

Alter counters that Nabokov—who fled the Bolsheviks and then the Nazis before landing in America—used language to awaken readers to the dense, many-layered, multi-connected reality of which we are part. “Through the surprise of an athletic metaphor, an odd choice of words, an unexpected angle of vision,” Nabokov sought not to evade but illuminate the real world.

And as for Lolita, its pedophile narration was controversial when first published (1958) and became a queasy prelude to the Swinging ‘60s when filmed by Stanley Kubrick (1962). If anything, it’s more controversial today as attitudes have hardened against child abuse, a practice whose prevalence is more widely understood now than it was then. To this Alter replies that Lolita’s narrator—though only dimly aware of the harm he causes—understands himself as a monster. However, Humbert Humbert is impervious to how preposterous he is as a third rage intellectual refugee spouting nonsense to rationalize his behavior. Nabokov was an entomologist when he wasn’t writing, and like the butterflies in his collection, he pinned human types to the backdrop of his fiction.