If Europe is a pedophile then America is a twelve-year old nymphet.  Thus, gentle reader, begins the tale ofLolita, Vladimir Nabokov's banned tour-de-force novel.  Taken literally, Lolita is the depraved first-person narrative of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged Parisian college professor visiting New England, who achingly lusts for Lolita, the twelve-year old daughter of his landlady.  Humbert is ultimately successful in his sexual pursuit of Lolita and the novel has been frequently misread as an endorsement of pedophilia.

Published in 1955 to very little fanfare, a year-end review by Graham Greene, calling it one of the best books of the year brought Lolita to the world's attention and it began to cause a stir.  Readers took exception to Greene's lauding of the novel, hurling phrases like "the filthiest book ever" and "unrestrained pornography" at Nabokov's work.  Lolita's American reception was significantly more subdued, but the novel has always attracted negative criticism, often from people who haven't read the book.

Lolita begins as a mock Victorian melodrama where a series of highly improbable circumstances bring our hero and heroine together as they embark on a road trip across America where their relationship is finally consummated.  Road novel becomes satire as Humbert realizes that his romantic, idealistic view of Lolita is constantly undercut by the reality that she's an American pre-teen interested in little more than movie and pop stars and junk food.  The narrative is densely woven with allusions to other writers (most notably Poe, Hawthorne, and French Fin-de-Siecle writers), tons of clever wordplay, the introduction of a doppelganger (German Romanticism anyone?), a cross-country chase, and a conclusion reminscent of both a Western and a prison-house confession.  And did I mention that Nabokov can be terribly funny as well?

Anyone looking for a prurient thrill will not find it in Lolita; there are no sexually explicit passages designed to titillate and corrupt.  What the reader will find is a cleverly constructed narrative, rife with brilliant wordplay, that references and parodies multiple genres of literature while simultaneously celebrating and warning of the great promise and optimism of an America establishing its global identity in the 1950's.