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In both those new photos and earlier tranches, one persistent, nagging detail stuck out to me. Though it’s easy to gloss over in favor creepy dentist chairs or taxidermied tigers, Epstein’s obsession with Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” rubbed the wrong way. The late sex criminal had a framed first edition the book displayed prominently in his Manhattan home and several of the newest photos highlight phrases from the novel written on women’s bodies.
Why this jumped out instead of that hanging bride sculpture or a signed dollar from Microsoft founder Bill Gates is hard to say. As the endlessly eloquent and unfathomably gross pedophile narrator at the center of Nabokov’s novel would have it, you don’t get much say in your obsessions. Still, it’s bothersome that a world-famous abuser was among the cohort who’ve been misreading and misrepresenting Nabokov’s “love affair with the English language” since its release.
We can’t ask him, but there’s no doubt that Epstein saw a fellow traveler in Humbert Humbert, the intellectual who uses his faculty with words to gloss over the horrors of child sexual abuse. The fact that “Lolita” is told from Humbert’s warped perspective has cemented the novel as a book for perverts in the popular imagination. Its appearance in Epstein’s office and in these new photos won’t help in that regard.
The problem with this conception is the opportunity cost it exacts on the American reading public. “Lolita” is disgusting, no doubt. It also happens to have some of the best sentence-level writing ever put to page in English. The average person eyeing your (admittedly provocative) paperback cover with suspicion on the subway will never know that, so long as the myth persists.
My standard pitch for “Lolita” goes like this: Think of the once-banned book as a parlor trick being pulled by one of the greatest writers to ever live. It’s a novel about a stepfather kidnapping and raping his stepdaughter, something that should repulse you innately. And yet, the book’s descriptions of desire are so gorgeous, and its narrator’s circumlocuting style so engaging, that you find yourself being dragged along like 12-year-old Delores Haze.
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Nabokov knew that the second his style flagged even a little bit, if he allowed the slightest crack in the facade, the reader’s disgust would creep back in and force them to put the book down. And he pulls off this push-pull magic act for more than 300 pages.
Nabokov set an impossible mark for himself and hit it, the literary equivalent of Babe Ruth’s called shot, and his book deserves to be mythologized in similar fashion. Epstein got his greasy mitts on a first edition of the masterwork because he happened to share Humbert’s stomach-churning interests. And now Epstein is too long in the ground to appreciate the irony of meeting the exact same fate as Humbert.
It’s enough to make you ill, provided you aren’t flipping through Humbert’s sweaty confessions already.
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