I’ve always had a curious relationship with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I love the book and yet detest the image of Lolita as she’s been used in popular culture. The image seems to me to miss the point of the book to point of distortion. So when I came across Graham Vickers’ Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again, I grabbed the chance to review it. Vickers examines in detail the way Lolita has been translated in various media and pop culture, comparing these incarnations with Nabokov’s construction. Along the way, he offers some possibilities for Nabokov’s source material, other examples of stories with similar themes and just enough gossipy bits about the making of the films to keep the book from descending into academic dryness. The book is a very readable treatise on the way Lolita has been used and abused at other hands than Humbert Humbert’s.

Vickers uses a line from the book to launch his investigation into Lolita’s public image: “’You must be confusing me with some other fast little article,’ says Lolita to her stepfather Humbert.” Dolores Haze in the book was far from the sultry teenage temptress soon to be associated with her character. She was a 12-year old prepubescent girl when she attracted Humbert’s attention, and her appeal was her resemblance to the child the narrator loved when he was fourteen. Nabokov does not present Lolita as an overtly seductive girl nor a girl whose sexual appetites are particularly different from other girls of a similar age. She was fondled to some extent when she sat on a man’s lap when she was ten, she and a female friend practiced how to kiss, and she had some kind of sexual experience with a boy at summer camp.

Vickers points out that to Humbert, Lolita’s sexiness was that of a child: delicate shoulder blades, long toes, unwashed hair. She is a conventional mix of charm and vulgarity, a child of her age fixated on music and magazines. The author notes that Nabokov fought having a picture of Lolita on the cover of his book at all, saying that he was “in the business of writing about subjective rapture, not objective sexualization.” In other words, we only see Lolita’s sexuality filtered through Humbert’s very particular appetites.

To Vickers this distortion is a key part of the novel, because Humbert is our authority on Lolita, despite his being far from a reliable narrator, obsessed as he is with his own sexual urges. Yet the poster for the 1962 film had actress Sue Lyon wearing heart shaped red sunglasses, sucking on a red lollipop (as Vickers says, “love and fellatio, get it?”). This famous poster entered popular culture almost immediately, defining Lolita for the public all over the world. In Vickers’ opinion, it “marks the first blatant visual travesty of Nabokov’s grubby chestnut-haired twelve-year-old and does not even resemble the way Sue Lyon looks in the movie.” The basic problem with the poster, as Vickers sees it, is the emphasis on Lolita’s sexuality, making her complicit with what happened to her.