I still don’t know what to think of this book. In no way does it glorify the sexual abuses Humbert puts Dolly through, nor does it pull punches when in moments of rare audience-facing lucidity Humbert recalls the effects that abuse had on Dolly. Several stand out—the line that had he “not broken her,” she would’ve been a championship tennis player; her remarking that something inside her tore after the first time he raped her; that she always wore a painted-on smile around guests, save the time when a friend’s father came by and the friend sat innocently on her father’s lap, because the visual of a girl her age sitting in a father’s lap could only mean horrors.

Despite all that, Humbert, the grand old aesthete he is, wants to focus on the painterly qualities of the American landscape as he carts his orphaned victim across the continental U.S. on a victory tour after he’s gained unfettered access to her. In his mind, the moments of her vocal and visible suffering are light afflictions in comparison to the weight of supposed passion he feels for a girl who never lives to see eighteen. I forgot the foreword by the time I got to Humbert’s comment that he’d only seek publication after his and “Lolita’s” deaths; in a fit of terrible irony, Dolly never gets to be anything but a plaything.

And yet there’s a handful of scenes so strikingly funny—laughing at a funeral funny, to be sure—like where Humbert goes to kill the other pedophile in Dolly’s life and the already-high entourage the man keeps around have parked him into the driveway. The man has genuinely violated all rules that govern basic human decency without a single real regret, but he’s stuck fucking Austin Powers shimmying his car out so he can go get caught. What are you supposed to do with that?

I think that’s where I land with the whole novel, in the end. Nabokov is a brilliant writer to craft such a terrible character whose desires I could never begin to understand, and yet I wanted the whole time to keep reading if only to see the sparkling moments of Dolores Haze as she truly was. Beyond the Americana, beyond the lecherous gaze of our narrator, beyond the lies she even told herself to protect her mind and future.

But do we ever experience that? Do we ever get to peek behind the curtain and see the real little girl rather than the “nymphet?” I don’t think so. Even as a pregnant seventeen year old who has to beg her (rightfully) estranged stepfather for money, maybe especially then because Humbert needs that final moment with her to feel somehow a continuation of all previous moments, we’re still being told a lie by a man who stands trial for murder and the serial abuse of a child.

What are we supposed to do with that?

“In this state, only the Chinese would be able to help her.”

Girl, your clit is off, I don’t think it’s time to order lo mein