In her new novel Fox, Joyce Carol Oates does to Nabokov’s Lolita the same thing that Nabokov does in Lolita. For the uninitiated, both novels are about a charming, cultured pedophile who preys on middle-school girls. If that’s all you see in these books, joke’s on you because the highly literate will know that these novels are word games. If you are in on the game, you can spaz out for hours over every paragraph. In order to derive the full amount of pleasure from Oates’ sly winkles to Nabokov, you need to know his text extremely well. Names of characters, names of places, literary allusions. None of it’s in your face because if you have to explain, you really shouldn’t bother.
There are so many layers, hints, suggestions that you can plunge deeper and deeper. But beyond all this, Fox is also a novel of ideas. Nabokov’s Lolita is not. It is a novel of and about language but it does not address polemical subjects or contribute to culture wars because it was written before all that. I will talk about this in a future post.
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