Teachers and Schoolgirls: My Struggles With Literary Fiction
I am not a fan of literary fiction. I’m a genre fiction man, top to toe. Litfic is mundane: college professors, teachers, writers, businessmen, all having midlife crises, affairs, fixating on people they shouldn’t. Impotent husbands, philandering wives, rebellious children…they bore me.
I know not all litfic is limited to these tropes. Just allow me to wallow in my dislike for a while.
Every now and then, though, just like I try lobster every decade or so to see if I’ve come to like it, I dip my toes back in. (No, I still don’t like lobster, and don’t hold your breath over my opinion of literary fiction.) I jumped back out of the water less than a hundred pages after opening White Noise a few years ago. I don’t care how much William Gibson likes Don DeLillo, he’s not for me.
But I did manage, with some effort, to get through Lolita not that long ago. It took me weeks, with three detours reading other books, including a longer book, before I finished. Everyone says it’s great literature, right? Classic story of a college professor fixated on someone he shouldn’t be, true to trope. Nabakov’s prose is lyrical, often luminous, and that was almost all I needed to keep reading, along with some bullheadedness on my part. I usually don’t hesitate to abandon books I don’t want to read, and I already knew how this one ends. It’s Lolita. Everyone knows how it ends, don’t they? I didn’t hate it. And it’s another notch on the old belt.
I imagine there are millions of reasons older men find young girls attractive. Some of them may have a thin coat of redemptive value to them, but not Humbert Humbert’s. The pervy professor is neither a sympathetic character nor a reliable narrator, yet Nabakov managed to get me into his head. He was shamelessly prurient, and I couldn’t resist that attitude, that trajectory of doom. It kept me going, as well as made me want to quit. I took some breaks. I came back. I plowed through.
Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa comes at the older-perv/way-too-young girl story from the opposite direction. You’d think it would be a contrast to Lolita, and while it is in some ways, there is still no happy ending, no redemption. Humbert is a predator and knows it. Vanessa is prey and doesn’t care. There may be less magic dust in Russell’s prose, but Vanessa is a more compelling character than Humbert. I went straight through this one.
The story is a mirror image of Lolita, a story that fits the “Me Too” era. Vanessa the willing victim is as obsessed with Strane, her high school English teacher, as Humbert is with Delores, his Lolita. But where Humbert knows what he’s doing and how wrong his lust is, Vanessa thinks she’s in a love story. She even reads Lolita, and comes out of it believing she and Strane are different than Humbert and Dolores. I found myself thinking “Oh, girl, no…” over and over, but of course no reader can stop Vanessa any more than they can call the cops on Humbert. I kept reading because I was afraid she’d haunt me if I stopped, her shade always making me wonder if she ever escaped her delusion.
So I kept reading, hoping she wouldn’t let her life crumble, knowing she doesn’t have to revel in her ruin as Humbert wallows in his lust. After 60 years, our culture has assimilated Lolita. Can anyone read it and not know how Humbert and Delores come out in the end? We read with no expectation that Humbert will save himself. We can hold out hope for Vanessa for a while.
One thing that makes Vanessa such a good book, or at least a readable one, is the narrator’s immersion in her misery. Vanessa’s love story has messed up her life and brought it to a dead stop because of her obsession with Strane, and she doesn’t seem to care.
These stories aren’t comfortable, but books aren’t always supposed to comfort us. Humbert, Dolores, Vanessa, and Strane are all out there in the real world; sometimes we just need the detachment provided by fiction to see them.
