Reading Lolita in Long Island.(THE STRAGGLER)

NATURE is, as one of Katherine Hepburn's characters observed, what we are put in this world to rise above. On the other hand, a Frenchman of at least equal sagacity pointed out that he who would act the angel makes himself a beast. Plainly, therefore, we should not aspire to rise too high above nature. Somewhere between the beast and the angel is a point of balance.

This line of thought began when, opening up my New York Post one recent Sunday, I found myself looking at Amy Fisher, "the Long Island Lolita." This was the girl who, back in 1992, shot her lover's wife in the face. Said lover, the egregious Joey Buttafuoco, was 18 years older than Amy. Their affair had begun a year before, when Joey was 35, Amy not quite 17. Following the shooting, Joey did time for statutory rape; Amy, for first-degree assault. Mrs. Buttafuoco recovered, and Sunday's newspaper story was about an attempt to bring all three of them together for a TV interview. Amy is now 31 and a married woman with two children.

Amy Fisher and her story were in fact far removed from Lolita and Lolita. For one thing, Amy was too old to be a nymphet. Lolita's lover Humbert Humbert specifies "between the age limits of nine and fourteen." The "real" Lolita (her creator told us, in the afterword that appeared in every edition of Lolita but the first, that "reality" is "one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes") was not yet 13 when Humbert commenced his affair with her. It was Humbert, not Lolita, who took revenge on the love rival at last, and he did a much better job of it, more stylish and more thorough, than clueless Amy. And the oafish, thick-skulled Joey Buttafuoco (a quite Nabokovian name, come to think of it--it means "light a fire") is, to put it very mildly indeed, no Humbert Humbert.

I note, however, that Ms. Fisher seems to have settled happily into a normal life after her youthful transgressions. In that respect, at least, she resembles Nabokov's heroine. One of Azar Nafisi's students, in the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, remarks of the nymphet that "all she wants is to live a normal life." That is quite right. Like much great art, Lolita is, among many other things, a hymn of forlorn longing for the humdrum and banal, voiced by an outsider personality. Think of Tennyson's Tithonus moaning: "Why should a man desire in any way / To vary from the kindly race of men?" Since literary masterpieces are created by literary geniuses, a type that can fully engage with very few of its fellow human beings, I suppose this beggar-at-the-window outlook on common experience is not very surprising.

At about this point in my reflections I pulled down my copy of Lolita from the shelves. The thought that came up, after an hour or so of random reading, was: What a falling-off there has been! I mean that in a social, not a literary sense. Novels just as good have been written since 1958 (the date of the first U.S. edition). No, my thought was the same one I have when I listen to old pop music, or watch old movies--that our civilization was much more ...