Word: nabokovs
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LOLITA HAS BECOME a sort of under-aged siren for the creators of stage and screen, luring writers and directors to crash on the undramatic shoals of Nabokov's first-person prose. First Stanley Kubrick in his 1962 movie, then some forgotten adapter in an early '70s musical, and now Edward Albee in this vulgarized comic drama have attempted to drag Nabokov's characters from the sheltering artistry of his novel into the coldly objective glare of the theater. It's beginning to become unpleasantly clear that Lolita's appeal to directors and audiences alike lies not in its author...
...Nabokov is innocent of such salaciousness, though undoubtedly Lolita's paperback sales depend on it. In his novel, he skirts pornography on one side and moralizing on the other, traveling a high road of precise plot construction and delicately tuned poetry, elevating the sordid story to a level of intensity that has far more to do with art than with Brooke Shields. But for Albee, the purity of this book was just too tempting; he apparently couldn't wait to get his hands on Nabokov's little girl, turning her from an attractive but commonplace adolescent into a loud-mouthed...
Given the transformation of the pre-teen rump into a sex symbol in dozens of designer-jeans ads, and the popularity of "nymphet" models on Madison Ave., staging the book that coined that term once again was more good commercial sense than homage to Nabokov. Although capitalizing on this latest fashion in exploitation shouldn't have to mean joining in gleefully, through much of Lolita that's what Albee seems to be doing. Where Nabokov will choose an elegant pun, Albee lunges for the obscene gag: where Nabokov will subtly makes you think about the arbitrariness of social rules, Albee...
LIVING UP to the talent of a writer like Nabokov takes some care and precision. But if this excerpt from Albee's program note is any clue, his intellect is muddied with sentiment when it comes to his predecessor: "The play of Lolita is both Nabokov and Albee...But, that being as it may...the entire work is Nabokov; it is my valentine to the great man, he who suffered fools so badly and who, so clearly, loved us all, even the Humbert Humberts and the Lolitas of this world...
NONFICTION: American Dreams, Studs Terkel ∙ The Girl I Left Behind, Jane O'Reilly ∙ Merton: A Biography, Monica Furlong ∙ Naming Names, Victor Navasky ∙ Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers ∙ Walt Whitman, Justin Kaplan ∙ Wayward Reporter: The Life of A.J. Liebling, Raymond Sokolov...