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Too darn hot
Romance fans clash over a new breed of explicit, kinky love story.
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Mrs. Schlegel forks over the journal entries she scribbled on scraps of paper while on the can. (She feigned GI distress fairly often during her cross-country flight with Humbert Guibert so she could have the privacy to write.) Humbert, apparently, is not dead either, but rather living out his last days fairly peacefully in Paris with his younger wife. He never even killed Gerry Sue Filthy (Clare Quilty). Indeed, Dolly Schlegel has come a long way since meeting Humbert at 231 Grassy St. in Goatscreek (342 Lawn St. in Ramsdale), and she wants the world to know what really happened.

If these dopey names, with their strained, literal-minded, one-to-one correspondence to Nabokov's, strike you as silly, congratulate yourself on your discerning mind. There's much about "Lo's Diary" that's unsophisticated, and that's not because of the narrator's age. Nor is the novel's callowness excused by the adult Dolly's acknowledgement that her adolescent musings are "definitely less literary" than Humbert's. (It's never a good sign when a book apologizes for itself in the prologue.)

The book reads like it was written by a grad student who took her MFA-program exercises ("Reimagine a scene from 'Lolita' from another character's POV" -- yawn) way too seriously. There are so many squandered opportunities here, it's almost criminal. Why trot out Dolly's husband and son in the prologue if we're never to learn how she met him (according to Pera, anyway), and how she managed to overcome years of psychic damage after fleeing the depravity of Filthy/Quilty? Didn't it occur to Pera that we might want to know whether, in this supposedly feminist version, Dolly ever tried her hand at a career before becoming a stay-at-home mom? Or whether her experience as a pedophile's sex slave at all invades the marital bed or taints the joy she derives from her own children?

Indeed, if anything, Pera takes too much of Humbert's version for granted -- particularly Lolita's "nymphean evil." Because Nabokov tells his story through an increasingly unreliable narrator, the character of Lolita is sometimes preternaturally devilish, sometimes a mere cipher. Instead of fleshing out the girl Nabokov called "the little deadly demon among the wholesome children," Pera has made Lo even more of a cunning, vicious monster. This is a little girl who tortures animals and people with so little remorse that she's a veritable sociopath, with the classic case history of a serial killer. The Long Island Lolita, Amy Fisher, is more sympathetic.

Not that Lo's home life is a breeding ground for happiness. At the start of "Lo's Diary" proper, Dolores Maze is a 12-year-old preoccupied with the A-bomb and nuclear physics. The possibility of radioactive mutation doesn't seem to scare her as it does others, and little wonder: Most people in Lo's world are horrible or already dead. Her mother is an abusive, man-hunting harpy who's not above shoving her daughter's face in the toilet; her brother died by an accidental but gruesome electrocution when she was 4; and just last year, her father -- who expressed affection by hugging her in the garage as they electrocuted lizards together -- dropped dead as well. Mom (whom Lo secretly calls "Plasticmom" or "the hen" or "the pig") tells her, "In this family only the males die."

Not that the females fare much better. The level of hatred between Isabel and Dolly Maze is not only shocking but left unexplained. Granted, many teenage girls trying to separate from their moms lash out in often unwarranted anger and disgust. But most big-mouthed teenagers also really need their mothers at times and have their tender moments, too. Lo does not. She sabotages her mother's love life, badmouths her to Isabel's best friend, dumps dead spiders in her mother's bed and is convinced that "when I'm sick she's happy."

When Humbert later picks Lo up from camp with the bogus story that Isabel's in the hospital, Lo explains to him, "All we can do is kill her, pull out the I.V., give her the wrong medicine, whatever, since a shit like her for sure doesn't deserve to go on living ... But maybe we don't actually have to murder her: When I show up in all these sexy clothes that her second and last husband bought me, she'll die in a burst of rage. She'll choke on it. Definitely." Nice kid.

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