It is, and it’s also a novel about a big old guy violating a spindly child over and over and over. Rebecca Solnit, for instance, wrote a cringe-inducing and hilarious essay, “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” including these lines: “A nice liberal man came along and explained to me this book was actually an allegory as though I hadn’t thought of that yet. Last year’s 60th anniversary of the publication of “Lolita” prompted some serious soul-searching and critical revision, most forcefully from female writers and critics. “There is compassion in Nabokov, but it is far outweighed by lofty or morose disdain.” I would argue that the first real fissure in the adulatory critical wall hailing the “literary giant” came in 1990, in George Steiner’s erudite assessment of the first volume of Brian Boyd’s Nabokov biography, “Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years.” Writing in The New Yorker, Steiner perceived, a lack of generosity of spirit in Boyd’s subject: “Nabokov’s case seems to entail a deep-lying inhumanity, or, more precisely, unhumanity,” Steiner wrote. I just spent the better part of three years with Nabokov, preparing a book about his friendship and eventual blood feud with Wilson.
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