I just re-read Lolita.
Nabokov’s most controversial novel is by far his most widely read, and, with the possible exception of Pnin, the best of his I’ve read so far. It’s a twisted love story, a travelog, a noir, a Western, a mystery; it’s the ramblings of a madman. And, not unimportantly, it’s a seemingly effortless frolic in the beauty of the English language (One would expect nothing less from Nabokov.)
Stylistically, the two novels could hardly be more different. Absalom, written in third person, consists almost entirely of long, complex, lyrical sentences (one of them running some seven pages), a prose-poetic text in which Faulkner holds back nothing. He makes no attempt to create realistic dialogue; each character is simply a puppet for his show. Although some have leveled this as a criticism, I actually think it works perfectly fine. I have no commitment to strict realism. Sound, on the other hand, is mostly in first person, and only rarely does Faulkner wax lyrical here. Dialogue is simplified and stream-of-consciousness abounds.
The story of the novel centers around two women, Eileen and Alice, who have been friends since childhood, as they figure out how to live their lives at the close of their twenties. For both women this centers on romantic and sexual encounters, and here we’re given Rooney’s standard fare; we’ve seen this before in both Normal People and Conversations With Friends, and I’m not convinced she made any significant advances in this area with her latest. In a recent tweet, LitHub referred to Rooney as “the bard of millennial intimacy,” and they’re not exactly wrong, but it’s a bit played by this point.
