I’m rereading Lolita right now. I do this every couple of years, because in my opinion Lolita is the best book ever written. I’ve borrowed a copy of The Annotated Lolita from one of my friends, and it’s fantastic. I now know what all those French words mean. Of course, I’ve sort of been borrowing it for the last couple of months, because I’ve got this darn graduate school thing keeping me from reading as much as I’d like. (Except for papers with titles like “Learning and Applying Contextual Constraints in Sentence Comprehension,” I’m reading plenty of those.) So, anyway, I’m trying to hurry up and finish Lolita, because my friend wants it back, and I turn the page, and right there, on page 265, is exactly what I was I trying to say about why we feel betrayed by false memoirs. Except, of course, Nabokov has said it much better than me. (Don’t you hate how Nabokov always does that?)

So here it is. From Lolita:

“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen King Lear, never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever revolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.”

Of course, as a writer, I’m fine with the hot-dog stand operator writing poetry, as long as his stuff doesn’t get published before mine.