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I could go on to describe how Lo psychologically brutalizes a nerdy, sensitive girl at camp, but the hamster scene is enough, I think, to illustrate how Pera hammers home that this girl's warped attempts to counteract her feelings of powerlessness make her not just receptive to Humbert but downright predatory. She's the antithesis of the vulnerable, too-trusting molestation victim.

Perhaps Pera believes that going to this extreme is the only way to give Lolita any autonomy. And indeed, Lo's sexual savvy does initially give her some power over Humbert. But the result is a cartoon. Pera doesn't create a realistic portrait of a teen's sexuality -- the volatile mixture of awkwardness and daring, fear and excitement, desire and revulsion. How much more affecting and tragic Pera's novel would have been had she created a Lolita who was sexual, and perhaps immoral on occasion, but also a feeling creature, a girl with both a conscience and some insecurity.

Lo's Diary By Pia Pera Foxrock, 307 pages Fiction   Buy Lo's Diary by Pia Pera

Pera's Lo cannot -- will not -- experience most ordinary emotions. Even when Humbert anally rapes her, Lo short-circuits her feelings: "I am plunged into such disgust that I say to myself, What difference does it make in the end, isn't it all the same horror, and then, what do I care ... maybe it's more advantageous to know how to do even that ... better to practice, to be used to everything."

Even when Lo enjoys sex, Pera depicts her emotions as stunted. Granted, lots of people -- both straight and gay -- experiment with homosexuality as kids, but even those who enjoy these adventures experience some anxiety or confusion about what it "means" about them. Not Lo, even though this is 1946, some 50 years before Lesbian Chic. As long as it feels good, she does it without a second thought. When a female friend and sometime sexual playmate at her camp professes her love for Lo and begins crying about their imminent parting, Lo "comforted her a little, but at the same time, it didn't seem like such a big deal ... anyway it seems weird for her to be so in love with me." (There's that shrug again.)

And when Lo loses her virginity -- in front of yet another fellow camper, to the girl's own lover -- she immediately likes the sex: "There's no pain at all, only the sensation that I am made of a thousand layers that he is unfolding one after another ... I only want to keep lying here." I don't know, even if a torn hymen isn't enough to make a 13-year-old wince, you'd think the presence of a third person might make things a little awkward.

The kid is as preternaturally responsive as the fantasy women in pornography: Lo alludes to "the electronic atomic supersonic orgasm, that, to my extreme amazement, stunned me when I was sliding down the pole at recess." Uh, yeah, I'm stunned too, even though I'm a bit of a Molotov cocktail myself. Considering that it takes fewer than 10 seconds to shimmy down a playground pole, I don't see how she could possibly climax, unless her clitoris is as reflexive as a knee that's struck by a physician's rubber hammer.

Pera gives Lo a ridiculous, pneumatic sort of sexuality wholly unencumbered by self-doubt or shame. Lo says that sex is great for the figure and the complexion, but she's never troubled by the changes in her body, never struggles with understanding her true desires, never worries about whether she's "normal," a famous preoccupation of teenagers (and adults, too, for that matter).

Pera chooses to interpret Lolita as a girl who knows how to come during intercourse at the age of 13, but is devoid of a single benevolent impulse. Can't she be sexual and flawed and yet still more than the "vile and beloved slut" that Humbert called her in Nabokov's version? Why would someone go to the trouble of writing from Lolita's point of view if she's only going to turn Lo into a cartoonish femme fatale who ridicules Humbert behind his back for being a "lousy" lover who just "lies there like a straw man"? Part of the beauty of "Lolita" is that Nabokov illustrated how closely Humbert's profound sickness and cruelty are intertwined with his loving and nurturing impulses. There is no such three-dimensionality here.

Lo's smug triumph in seducing Humbert is quickly dispelled when she realizes what a selfish fuck he is. Even when she's running fever, "he's happy as a clam, touching me where I'm burning and absorbing the heat from me as if I'm a hot-water bottle, like the ... parasite he is."

She laments, "It's nauseating to see a grown man, with curls of white hair on his chest, thick eyebrows, and on his face that slightly doglike expression, with only one purpose in life, only one interest: to get inside me." Well, yes. But how about some more tender moments, too?

At the risk of sounding perverse, it seems obvious that Lo might entertain some real feelings of attachment to Humbert, as contemptible and exploitative as he is. In real life, incest and other abuse survivors are often tormented by the positive feelings tangled up with their humiliation and the rage they feel for their perpetrators. On the other hand, although Lo wonders whether Humbert will "try to eliminate me" once she passes a certain age, she never seems to experience any real terror that this man might kill her, or, more likely, abandon her without a cent.

At the book's end, ensconced in Filthy's manse, she overhears the perverse playwright telling his merry band of hedonists, "I'm already bored by her."

Seems that he's deemed Lo a "foolish and whimsical girl who imagines she has the world at her feet" and Humbert "an old man so lacking in imagination that he thinks the greatest thing in life is to fuck her." Ah, a dismissive synopsis at the novel's end to balance the apology in the prologue. So glad I bothered to read what lay between.
salon.com | Oct. 6, 1999

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