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Humbert's obsession began in a dreamily distant beach resort where he met and desperately loved a girl—both being unlucky 13. Since Humbert is given to puckish literary references, the girl's name, of course, was Annabel Leigh (Poe spelled it Lee). After Humbert's early love is interrupted by shame and death, he incessantly searches for a return to that lost, childish kingdom by the sea. He searches through the mail order catalogues of Paris whoredom, through a low-comedy marriage, through Central Park—until he finally finds Annabel's reincarnation in Dolores Haze, known as Lolita. She is his culture-vulture landlady's daughter in a small New England town where Humbert has holed up to do some literary work. The girl is just a gum-chewing, Coke-filled, comic-book-educated sub-teen-ager —but she is Humbert's fatal love.
The Final Farce. Humbert marries Lolita's mother in order to be near the child. The mother, through Humbert's diaries, discovers his true predilections, runs distraught out of the house and is killed by a car. Now begins the prodigiously clumsy business of Humbert's trying to seduce his own stepdaughter—the fumbling, phony-paternal tenderness, the elaborate scheming, the agony of longing which Author Nabokov manages to make at once ludicrous, terrible and utterly convincing. But in the end, as Humbert tells the event, "it was she who seduced me . . . Modern coeducation, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved [her]."
Having finished a parody of decent domesticity, "Hum" and "Lo" embark on a parody of incest that takes them across the continent. They restlessly traverse the neon-lit landscape of filling stations, diners, small towns, automobiles and asphalt —the motel tundras where, if one pays, checks out by noon and turns in the key, one can voyage to the end of night.
Along Humbert's and Lolita's way, there are scenes of horrible irony. CHILDREN UNDER 14 FREE, says a sign at one hotel. But the most truly horrible part of the book is the intimate fashion in which the reader is made to see how from a monstrous relationship a kind of shadow of a good life emerges. Humbert, the false father, often becomes a truly tender pseudo parent; Lolita, the perverted child, becomes a true innocent. In the end—to Humbert's great agony—she is pregnant and happy with a young, goonlike husband. She has escaped, but there is no escape for Humbert. He seeks out a rich, pansy-type writer who had casually seduced her earlier, and in a horrific scene of violence and farce, shoots him.