Jeffrey Epstein was definitely reading "Lolita" wrong

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His sin, his soul, his pad

There was plenty to ogle at in the New York Times’ recent story on Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhome. An unsettling sculpture of a bride dangling from a rope here, a credenza covered in photos of some very famous faces there.

Though it’s easy to miss with a taxidermied tiger staring at you, one detail about Epstein’s office stuck in my craw. The late sex criminal had a framed first edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” displayed prominently.

Why this jumped out instead of the surveillance cameras in the bedroom or the 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 irksome that Epstein was among the cohort who’ve been misreading and misrepresenting Nabokov’s “love affair with the English language” since its release.

Though we can’t ask him, 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 won’t help in that regard.

The problem with this conception is the opportunity cost it exacts on the American reading public. “Lolita” also happens to have some of the best sentence-level writing ever put to page in the English language. 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 is meant to 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.

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 he’s died in prison and 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.

What do you think? Will Epstein’s “Lolita” veneration further damage the reputation of the book? Should we all start reading an unproblematic genre, like YA? Sound off in the comments.

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