L
olita, light of my life, fire of my
loins.” This disturbing sentence
from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
is often misremembered as the
novel’s opening line. The 1955
book in fact begins with a mock foreword,
written by one John Ray Jr., PhD, of the
fictional Widworth, Massachusetts. Ray has
ostensibly been commissioned by the lawyer
of the now deceased Humbert Humbert,
the pedophile narrator of Nabokov’s tale,
to edit his client’s manuscript. Ray assures
us that “save for the correction of obvious
solecisms and a careful suppression of a
few tenacious details,” the manuscript is
“preserved intact,” before going on to de-
ride those “old fashioned readers” who try
to deduce from such a narrative the “‘real’
people beyond the ‘true’ story.”
A creation of Nabokov, Ray unsurpris-
ingly follows his maker’s dictum that words
like “reality” should come in quotation
marks. For Nabokov, what was real and true
was always up for debate—a matter of sub-
jectivity as well as objectivity. He saw in the
natural world as much deception as in the
pages of a novel. “Reality,” he insisted in a
1962 interview with the BBC, “is an infinite
succession of steps, levels of perception,
false bottoms, and hence unquenchable,
unattainable.”
That is why the very title of Sarah
Weinman’s new book, The Real Lolita:
The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the
Novel That Scandalized the World, should
alert readers that her project is a defiant
one. There are none of the quotation
marks around “real” that Nabokov or his
creation, John Ray Jr., PhD, would have
insisted on. In this literary work of true-
crime reporting, Weinman is less interest-ed in abiding by Nabokov’s rule book than
in challenging what she sees as the ethical
limits of his aestheticism.
Weinman argues that Nabokov down-
played the extent to which Sally Horner’s
case inspired his novel, a move she says
was meant to preserve the “carefully con-
structed myth of Nabokov, the sui genesis
artist.” In telling Horner’s story, Wein-
man hopes to right a narrative wrong,
reining in the excesses of fiction writers
like Nabokov and returning Horner to
her rightful place at the center of his fa-
mous novel. It is an admirable, if at times
unsuccessful, mission. While Weinman’s
refusal to read Lolita on Nabokov’s terms is
refreshing, her book can also feel hostile to
the very nature of literary fiction—which
is always attempting to draw both from the
world and beyond it—and uninterested
in the political capacities of stories that
aren’t true.
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM ROBINSONTRUE CRIME
Uncovering the mysteries of Lolita
by JENNIFER WILSON
Jennifer Wilson is a writer and critic. She has a PhD
in Russian literature from Princeton University.