A reader writes:
I’m bummed out by Martin Amis’s notion of the novelist as “host.” I abhor a host. I demand, to paraphrase Denis Johnson’s idea, that an artwork’s agenda not include me. I want to be dropped into a strange and even forbidding land, one I could not possibly reach on my own, and I want to make my own damn way through it. Then, when I return, I can take stock of whatever alterations the artwork has demanded of me.
As for Nabokov, I have a very hard time thinking of him as a gentle host who has offered me his best chair and poured a glass of fine wine and then pulled back the curtain on Humbert Humbert’s consciousness. Nabokov presents Humbert as seducer, true, but he demands we enter HH’s world utterly. We know he has succeeded when we’re aroused by the experience – Humbert’s experience – of a prepubescent girl on our lap. And then the greatest power of Lolita is in precisely those moments when we are suddenly, even shockingly torn from Humbert’s dream and into the reality he refuses to guide us through – namely the damage HH does to Lo – but leaves us to recognize and reckon with alone. No host he, I have to say.
The Dish 