‘Travels with Agatha Christie and Sir David Suchet' review: The actor known for Hercule Poirot follows in the author's footsteps
Celebrity-hosted travel shows are often underwhelming. Anthony Bourdain was an exception who brought real vigor and energy to the genre. But I was intrigued by the premise here because Suchet's career is so interwoven with that of Christie's. 'He became my very best friend,' he says of Poirot. Like the fictional character, Suchet is a genial, cordial and elegantly enthusiastic companion and guide. He mentions that his grandfather worked as a Fleet Street photographer, which is perhaps why he is compelled to take portraits of each expert with whom he spends time. It's a nice touch.
Christie suffered from acute seasickness, unfortunate considering her trips to each continent were by ship. But it was a trait she would give to Poirot. 'I think travel is a wonderful educator,' Suchet says, but the show itself doesn't take that idea far enough. I was hoping for more insights into how this 10-month tour — upon which Christie embarked before she was famous; she had just one novel published at the time — might have shaped her mindset as a person, but also specifically as a writer.
The Christies went on the tour as part of a group tasked with promoting the upcoming 1924 British Empire Exhibition, an event that isn't fully explained but sounds something like a trade convention. The empire of it all is a cringe-making scenario for the TV series, which is smart enough to steer into criticisms of colonialist realities, rather than pretend they don't exist (as Christie and her travel companions surely did).
In Cape Town, for example, Suchet visits a residence that belonged to Cecil Rhodes, the English imperialist whose policies paved the way for apartheid. But then Suchet meets with the three founders of a group called Rhodes Must Fall to discuss the 'serious legacies of colonialism that are still not only lingering but are continuing to reproduce themselves.' Too often, however, there's a fraught undercurrent throughout 'Travels with Agatha Christie & Sir David Suchet' when it comes to British exploitation that the series fails to overcome despite its best efforts.
While in Africa, Suchet visits Kimberley, the site of diamond mines (and where Rhodes founded the De Beers diamond company), and the plunder and extraction are so clear. Suchet notes that the setting turns up in one of Christie's novels, 'The Man in the Brown Suit': The more he reads the book, 'the more I'm becoming aware of how many of Agatha's own experiences make their way into the plot,' he says, but that's the extent of what we learn. You could argue this is a travel show, not a documentary series about her novels, but I think a better ratio between the two would have resulted in something more compelling.
The British characters in Christie's books are forever looking down their noses at anyone considered an outsider or 'foreign,' and that often extends to Poirot himself, a Belgian. There are different ways to read into that. Is Christie skewering their insular attitudes? That's my preferred interpretation, because the aristocrats and other elites in her novels are absurd creatures to begin with. Christie was a world traveler by the time her career began in earnest; it's fair to wonder if that informed how she viewed, and wrote about, the bigotries and narrow-mindedness of the British upper crust. The series doesn't broach the topic, maybe because there's just no way to know. She didn't keep a journal during the trip, despite telling a newspaper reporter before her departure that 'the tools of my trade are going around the world with me — typewriter, notebooks and heaps and heaps of paper.'
In that same interview, which Suchet reads ahead of his own departure, she anticipates the reception she might receive in each new place: 'I'm not sure that the people in the overseas dominions are going to like me. They may find my love of crime objectionable.'
And then, with an early 20th century version of 'welp,' she adds: 'It can not be helped.'
'Travels with Agatha Christie & Sir David Suchet' — 2 stars (out of 4)
Where to watch: BritBox
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Los Angeles Times
32 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Spinal Tap is back and ready to talk. Just don't bring up the last movie
I'm a minute into my interview with Spinal Tap and I've already angered vocalist David St. Hubbins. Sitting down with the rock trio, which includes lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel and bassist Derek Smalls, I mention what an honor it is to speak to the legendary group. 'Just slow your roll,' Tap's frontman barks. 'You don't know it's a real honor until you start. So start, and you'll find out if it is.' Not an auspicious beginning to an hour-long conversation with England's loudest and most punctual band. But a bit of testiness is understandable. On this late July morning at Studio 1 Culver, Tap begins its promotional duties for the long-awaited sequel to 1984's 'This Is Spinal Tap,' the documentary that unwittingly revitalized the pioneering metal group's career. The world is wondering if lightning will strike twice, so a lot is on the line for Tap. In fact, you can feel the tension as video crews and production personnel dart anxiously through the cavernous studio. Earlier in the day, I had separately seen each of the band members preparing for our interview, which was to be in character. Michael McKean, 77, sat in a makeup chair, eyes closed, as the wig that transforms him into St. Hubbins was being fussed over. I accidentally bumped into Harry Shearer, 81, in a conference room, not yet fully decked out as Smalls. And, later, Christopher Guest, 77, was spotted pacing around as Tufnel, speaking in the axman's jabbing working-class English accent to an assistant. Now, though, as we all sit together in this quiet side room, the guys are fully Tapped in as the fictional band members, focused on the expectations surrounding this forthcoming film. Back in 1984, director Marty DiBergi (better known as Rob Reiner) chronicled the trio during their disastrous American tour, one that seemed to signal the group's death knell. Instead, Spinal Tap have enjoyed many afterlives, occasionally reuniting before dissolving into acrimony once again. Consequently, there's plenty of fan curiosity about 'Spinal Tap II: The End Continues' (opening Sept. 12), which follows the behind-the-scenes preparations for Tap's latest — and maybe last? — comeback show, the group's first public performance since 2009. It should be a triumphant moment, but there's one problem: DiBergi has yet to show them the movie. 'Marty's hiding something,' Smalls says, concerned. He looks to his bandmates for reassurance, his soulful eyes framed by his still fabulously bushy eyebrows. 'I don't know about that,' replies St. Hubbins, trying to stay positive. Even all these years later, he's a natural leader hoping to keep this boat from capsizing.'The first film didn't really portray us in the best light. But I still think it was from a good place. I don't think he was setting out to do anything wrong.' 'But he managed it, somehow,' Tufnel chimes in. He seems grumpy, like he's not entirely happy to be here. In a separate Zoom interview, DiBergi explains why he's dragging his feet: He's nervous how Tap will respond. 'They were very upset with the way I portrayed them,' he tells me. 'I thought I showed them in a good light but I guess they felt that I showed too many of the warts and not enough of the clear skin.' Indeed the guys are still salty about how they came off in 'This Is Spinal Tap.' Smalls, for one, is tired of people making fun of them for getting lost on the way to the stage during that infamous Cleveland show. 'Many times during that tour, we got to the stage,' Smalls points out, proudly. 'And as an addendum,' St. Hubbins adds, 'if Marty had the information — 'Oh, you want to go through this door' — he could have told us.' If the mighty musical force behind such stone-cold bangers as 'Big Bottom' and 'Sex Farm' weren't thrilled at how they were portrayed in the first film, they will not be pleased to learn that, 41 years later, they continue to be captured exhibiting hopelessly moronic behavior. (One of Smalls' musical contributions to the new film is a song titled 'Rockin' in the Urn,' which is about head-banging after cremation.) But what's less expected are the faintest hints of maturity in a band celebrated for stuffing its trousers and mistaking being sexist for being sexy. Have the guys who once wrote 'Bitch School' finally become enlightened? 'Well, certainly they've changed physically,' DiBergi tells me. 'They're in their 70s now. But as far as their music and their outlook on life, I didn't see a whole lot of growth there. I talked to their promoter. He said that he was surprised at how little they had grown emotionally or musically. They did grow wrinkles on their face.' Noticeably, none of the bandmates sit closely together in the room, each in his own chair in a circle staring at one another. Where once they were garish young rockers buried under mascara, now they are garish older rockers, desperately hanging onto their youth. St. Hubbins' hair is bleached blond, while Tufnel's makeup does nothing to hide the years. Smalls' mustache still looks magnificent. The atmosphere is cordial, if not exactly warm. 'Spinal Tap II' reveals that they now live in different parts of the globe — St. Hubbins in Morro Bay, Calif.; Tufnel in Berwick-upon-Tweed in Northern England; Smalls in London — and haven't spoken since the last comeback tour. Still, they try to be philosophical about the unspoken friction between them. 'We last played together before all this in 2009,' St. Hubbins explains. 'A lot has happened since then. That tour didn't end terribly well. It's a personal thing — we've worked it out, we've managed to forget most of it. So we did have a lot of time to be apart and to think, 'How did we get here? Do we like it here? Would we like to go somewhere else — is there a taxi that can take us there?'' Nonetheless, the guys know how lucky they are. Never mind how many of their drummers have died along the way. (In 'Spinal Tap II,' their attempts to recruit all-stars like Questlove and Lars Ulrich go nowhere because everyone is too scared to sign up for the gig.) So many of their peers are now gone. A week before we speak, Ozzy Osbourne succumbed to a fatal heart attack. Not that Tap ever resorted to biting the head off a bat. 'We had doves,' St. Hubbins points out. 'We didn't bite them. Some of them bit us.' 'We killed them,' notes Smalls. 'Well, that was an accident,' St. Hubbins says. 'They suffocated — that was a packing issue. Should have used more peanuts.' It's a remarkable thing to be alive long enough to see this once-derided band finally getting its due. But as 'Spinal Tap II' demonstrates, metal bands get respectable if they last long enough, which might explain why Elton John and Paul McCartney show up in the new film to pay tribute. Even the reviewers have gotten kinder, although St. Hubbins has little nice to say about the press, recalling his least-favorite question a journalist ever asked him: What's the meaning of life? 'It was all I could do to keep from slapping her for even asking that,' he grumbles. 'It was just a sneaky, ultra-personal question, because I do know the meaning of life but I'm not going to tell anyone. Work it out yourself.' They're happier reminiscing about the band's early days, when childhood chums St. Hubbins and Tufnel first formed as the Thamesmen, later bringing on Smalls. 'David was always the restless one,' recalls Tufnel. 'He was always searching for something to write about. Derek was always the quiet one. He'd nod a lot and we'd think, 'He must know the answer.' It turned out he had a neck thing — but he knows when to say things and when not to.' Rock 'n' roll, of course, isn't just Tap's abiding passion but also one of its principal lyrical concerns. 'Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight,' 'Heavy Duty' and 'The Majesty of Rock' saluted the glory of power chords and swaggering attitude. The band has also recorded its fair share of songs about fame and Stonehenge, but the trio have largely shied away from politics. During these dark, divisive days, has there been a temptation to sing about the state of the world? 'I would consider writing a song telling people that we're not going to write any songs about politics,' St. Hubbins counters. 'That would be useful — then people would stop asking questions like that. No offense.' Is this something that comes up a lot with journalists? 'Never,' he replies. 'You're the first. But we're drawing the line there.' 'Can I ask a question?' Tufnel interjects, confused. 'This has begun? The interview?' Of the three musicians, Tufnel seems the most different since the first film. Now happily operating a small cheese shop and living contentedly with his girlfriend, he mostly avoids the spotlight. But when asked what he'd tell his younger self, he gets alarmed. 'If the older us is going back [in time], the younger one would probably have a heart attack — it's a frightening idea,' he says. Some will accuse Spinal Tap of going for a cynical cash grab with this new film, which will be accompanied by a new album and a written oral history, 'A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap.' But the band strenuously denies that accusation. 'That doesn't apply to us,' Tufnel says. 'Because there's no cash,' Smalls admits. Tufnel nods. 'There's no cash involved in our careers, basically.' And in regard to whether this latest reunion will stick, previous ones certainly didn't. But you can't keep a good made-up rock band down. 'It's better and worse than a family,' Tufnel says of Tap's bond, 'because you have closeness — and the tension and the resentment and the hatred.' 'The thing that's different about this family,' St. Hubbins adds, 'is there's no one richer than us who's going to leave us any money. Families often have that to look forward to.' 'Everybody in the world is richer than us,' Tufnel declares, which gets a surprised laugh out of McKean. Not St. Hubbins, but McKean, who seems delighted by his longtime partner. Perhaps Spinal Tap's musical heyday is over, but they can still crack each other up. Who knows: Maybe these guys have a future in comedy.
Yahoo
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5 Tu Clothing autumn pieces to buy before they sell out, according to a shopping expert
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I will never stop raving about them (they've just released a new pair here). Browse new-in Tu Clothing Browse Tu's denim collection So, you can imagine how excited I was when Tu Clothing dropped their new denim collection, along with some super on-trend 2025 autumn pieces. I was first to the checkout and had everything delivered ASAP so I could report back on what's actually worth buying (spoiler: nothing disappointed). Here are the fashionable finds I think you'll be glad you snapped up - and I have a feeling some of them are going to sell out quickly. ✨ Indigo Denim Midaxi Dress, £28 ✨ Shop now Do I need another denim dress? Absolutely not. However, a denim dress is my go-to when I don't know what else to wear but still want to look cool and effortless. This one really does tick all the boxes, from its midi length to the half button-up design (the fewer buttons, the better in my eyes) and the coordinating belt that lets you cinch in your waist as much or as little as you like. 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Vox
an hour ago
- Vox
The scandalous literary classic we've never stopped arguing about
is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. When Lolita first appeared 70 years ago, in 1955, it was so controversial that no American publisher was willing to touch it. Today, Lolita is hailed as a classic, a masterpiece, one of the great novels of the English language. Yet Lolita also comes with a sense that it is still, perhaps, too controversial to touch. A book about a man who kidnaps and repeatedly rapes his 12-year-old stepdaughter, all told in ravishing rainbow-streaked prose? 'They'd never let you publish that now,' writer after writer has declared. In a development that seems almost too on the nose, it was recently reported that Jeffrey Epstein kept a prized first edition of the novel in his home, under glass. 'I love that book,' someone told me recently when he saw me rereading it. Then: 'Am I still allowed to love that book?' Next Page Book recommendations — both old and new — that are worth your time, from senior correspondent and critic Constance Grady. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. We certainly read Lolita very differently than we used to. For decades after its publication, readers both nodded to the horror at the center of the novel but also believed it was a little unsophisticated to dwell only on the assault. In pop culture, Lolita became synonymous with a teenaged seductress who deserves whatever she gets. Today, however, the received wisdom is that Lolita is not a romance but a horror story. In the 70 years since its publication, Lolita — lovely, sensual Lolita; obscene, monstrous Lolita; bleak, tragic Lolita — has become a barometer of sorts for cultural change. Vladimir Nabokov's novel is so multifaceted that it reflects the priorities of its readers back at us, showing us what we value and fear most at any given moment in time. We're still arguing over Lolita today, and our debates mirror the contours of our current culture war: a horror at an abuser's attempt to cover up their abuse; a terror that all that is pleasurable will be moralized into oblivion. What kind of book could plausibly be experienced both as an erotic comic romp in the 1950s and a searing dismantling of rape culture on its 70th birthday? Only ever Lolita. How did they ever publish Lolita? Lolita was born a scandal. Initially, Nabokov planned to publish the novel anonymously, with the only clue to his authorship the presence of a minor nonspeaking character whose name, Vivian Darkbloom, anagrammed to Vladimir Nabokov. But Lolita was so characteristic of Nabokov, with its dense wordplay, its butterfly motifs, its musical language, that Nabokov's friends convinced him that everyone would know he wrote it anyway. Four American publishers, likely fearing expensive obscenity lawsuits, turned down Lolita. Nabokov sent the manuscript went off to Paris's Olympia Press, which knew how to publish obscene novels, and there it became an underground cult object: the book too scandalous to be published in the US, the literary novel from the pornographic publisher. In 1958, when it finally came out in the US, it shot to the top of the bestseller lists and transformed Nabokov from an obscure Russian-born writer of tricky novels into a wealthy household name. Not to say that Lolita is not a tricky novel. Lolita is narrated by one Humbert Humbert, a smooth-talking charmer who confesses to us early on that he is sexually obsessed with little girls between the ages of 8 and 14: 'nymphets,' he calls them. His landlady's 12-year-old daughter Dolores Haze — nicknamed Lolita by Humbert — is just one such nymphet, and Humbert is so obsessed with her that he decides to marry her mother in order to have more access to Dolores. After Mrs. Haze dies, Humbert seizes the moment to kidnap Dolores, taking her off on a demented road trip back and forth across America, going from one motel to the next, debauching her all the way. Critics were puzzled by why Nabokov lavished some of his richest, most pleasurable prose on such an appalling story. Humbert is such a strange, unstable figure that the term 'unreliable narrator' was coined in part to describe him. He narrates his depravities in luxuriant, beautiful sentences full of wordplay and neologisms, funny and mordant. He plays constantly for our sympathy: at one moment calling himself a monster, the next swearing he loves Lolita with a deep and undying passion, the next informing us with an air of triumph that it was she who seduced him. You can tell, reading Lolita, that Humbert wants you to like him. It's harder to tell if Nabokov wants you to like Humbert, too. Early critics by and large agreed that Lolita was a masterpiece (with some notable exceptions). But they were puzzled by why Nabokov lavished some of his richest, most pleasurable prose on such an appalling story. How was anyone supposed to read it? One of the most influential early readers who laid the blueprint for how Lolita would be received was legendary literary critic Lionel Trilling. For Trilling, the pleasure of the novel was the point. He was part of a generation of young, au courant critics who carefully prized such pleasure, who took it as a point of pride that they were not dreary old Victorian killjoys who feared every book might corrupt the morals of the young. If it was pleasurable to read Humbert's words, to fall into his point of view and learn to see the world as he did — well then, that was the correct way to read the novel. It didn't mean that you condoned child sex abuse. It meant that you understood allegory. Trilling eventually concluded that Lolita was, in a generic sense, a story about love: following in the literary tradition of courtly love, it was about a forbidden romance so scandalous that it could never end in marriage, like the love between Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, married to another man, and Vronsky. Readers were no longer shocked when novelists broke the taboo of adultery, Trilling reasoned, and so Nabokov had to be extreme with Lolita. 'The breaking of the taboo about the sexual unavailability of very young girls has for us something of the force that a wife's infidelity had for Shakespeare,' Trilling wrote. 'H.H.'s relation with Lolita defies society as scandalously as did Tristan's relation with Iseult, or Vronsky's with Anna. It puts the lovers, as lovers in literature must be put, beyond the pale of society.' Trilling's argument lived on, in an ever-more-flattened form, for the next 50 years or so. It was, in fact, the idea that Lolita was about not love but horror, that the pleasure of Humbert Humbert's prose was not to be trusted, that was the dissenting view. As Lolita entered into popular culture, it was largely understood through the lens of forbidden romance and adolescent lust. 'Lolita' and 'nymphet' both entered the dictionaries to mean a sexually precocious girl. Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film adaptation made iconic the image of Dolores Haze licking a lollipop, sending the camera a piercing, erotically charged gaze over the rim of her heart-shaped sunglasses. The reading would persist unchanged for decades. In 1997, Adrien Lyne's adaptation played out the story in front of a vaseline-smeared lens, misty and nostalgic and lovely. Lana Del Rey would play repeatedly with Lolita imagery in her early career, singing about how romantic it was when she played Lolita to her older boyfriend's Humbert Humbert. It was, in fact, the idea that Lolita was about not love but horror, that the pleasure of Humbert Humbert's prose was not to be trusted, that was the dissenting view. James Mason and Sue Lyon on the set of Lolita, which was released in 1962 and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Seven Arts Production/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images In 1995, literary scholar Elizabeth Patnoe describes finding her classmates angrily, belligerently resistant to the idea that it might be possible to despise Humbert Humbert as an unrepentant child sex offender. The men in the classroom, she says, found Humbert relatable and worthy of compassion, and were shocked when she said she hated him because of what he did to Dolores. One accused her of having 'cheated the text.' At the time, to take a moral reading of Lolita was to be embarrassingly Victorian. It was to deny oneself the pleasure of Nabokov's language for no particular reason. Twenty years later, however, Patnoe's interpretation has picked up steam. It has become, for many readers, the dominant way to read Lolita: by understanding it as a book about the rape of a child, and Humbert as the monster who is trying to fool you. In this reading, the pleasure is a trap. Finding the pain under Lolita There's plenty of evidence within Lolita to suggest that we are meant to be looking beneath Humbert's playful sentences for the pain of Dolores Haze. Even as Humbert insists that it was Dolores who seduced him, he also tells us that Dolores finds her sexual encounters with Humphrey painful, that she cries every night when she thinks that he is asleep, that she hoards her allowance so that she can run away from him. (He steals it back from her, but she runs away from him regardless.) Dolores does seem to have a crush on Humbert when she first meets him, but it vanishes as soon as she is faced with the reality of what exactly he means to do to her. Under a reading that focuses on Dolores and her pain, even the novel's title and Humbert's repeated invocations of 'my Lolita' are an attempt from Humbert to control Dolores as brutally and totally as possible: He has taken even her name from her, and he has made us, his readers, complicit in it. There is also some evidence that Nabokov endorsed this reading of his book. Speaking to the Paris Review for a 1967 issue, Nabokov appeared appalled when his interviewer suggested that Humbert Humbert had a 'touching' quality. 'I would put it differently: Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear 'touching,'' Nabokov replied. 'That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl' — that is to say, Dolores, whose name means sorrow. In the same interview, however, Nabokov vigorously disavowed any moral or didactic reading of his novels. It's hard to know for sure what he made of Humbert's fans as they multiplied across the decades. It wasn't until the mid-2010s that a Dolores-centric reading of Lolita finally began to gain more traction. Related The Great Awokening is transforming America In the New Republic in 2015, Ira Wells tracked the public's eagerness to read Lolita as the story of a sexually appealing young girl against the language that suggested Dolores's tragedy. 'The publication, reception, and cultural re-fashioning of Lolita over the past 60 years is the story of how a twelve-year-old rape victim named Dolores became a dominant archetype for seductive female sexuality in contemporary America,' wrote Wells: 'It is the story of how a girl became a noun.' Probably the most high-profile of these essays came from the feminist critic Rebecca Solnit, in her 2015 LitHub essay 'Men Explain Lolita to Me.' 'A nice liberal man came along and explained to me this book was actually an allegory as though I hadn't thought of that yet,' Solnit wrote. 'It is, and it's also a novel about a big old guy violating a spindly child over and over and over. Then she weeps.' How Lolita survived Me Too The new Lolita takes were becoming mainstream just around the time of the so-called Great Awokening, those days in the late Obama era when it felt urgent and necessary to explore how misogynistic ideologies were encoded into works of art and popular culture. Gamergate and the Fappening ricocheted around the internet. Then in 2017, Me Too exploded into popular consciousness, and Lolita became, abruptly, very urgent indeed. In novels and memoirs of that time, changing the way you read Lolita became a metaphor for changing the way you think about consent. Related Reading Lolita in the wake of the My Dark Vanessa controversy When Me Too went mainstream, America began to reconsider old love stories and jokes, wondering if they were really so funny and romantic after all. (Listen, me too.) Almost immediately, commenters on the right began to declare that the left had, just like those killjoy Victorians, gone too far, become too moralistic: that they were destroying art and eroticism alike out of a desire to keep the world sanitized and safe and — using a word that had become a pejorative rather suddenly — woke. Lolita became a chief exhibit in that argument. Me Too, these commenters declared, was going to come for Lolita, and the book would never have seen the light of day in contemporary publishing. 'What's different today is #MeToo and social media — you can organize outrage at the drop of a hat,' 'If Lolita was offered to me today, I'd never be able to get it past the acquisition team,' publisher Dan Franklin was quoted saying in The Spectator, 'a committee of 30-year-olds, who'd say, 'If you publish this book we will all resign.'' You can find Dolores's voice in its pages quite easily, once you start listening for her. When I look back on meditations on Lolita around this time, however, what I find are a few declarations that Lolita is a misogynistic novel; but a great deal more pieces by readers who went back to Lolita expecting to find it appalling, and instead found it holds up remarkably well. Many of the works of art that were allegedly 'canceled' by the excesses of the woke mob in the wake of Me Too are works whose essence changes entirely when you look at them as stories of sexual assault. If you go digging for the voices of the sexual assault victim in, say, Sixteen Candles, you find nothing. Lolita, however, rewards such a read. You can find Dolores's voice in its pages quite easily, once you start listening for her. 'Perhaps—and at Vegas odds—only Lolita can survive the new cultural revolution,' Caitlin Flanagan wrote in The Atlantic in 2018. 'No one will ever pick up that novel and issue a shocked report about its true contents; no feminist academic will make her reputation by revealing its oppressive nature. Its explicit subject is as abhorrent today as it was upon the book's publication 60-plus years ago.' What becomes much more difficult, in such a reading, is enjoying the music of Nabokov's prose without shame. Who's reading Lolita right? Since 2018, as the Me Too backlash has mounted, the culture war over Lolita has shifted once again. The question is not, now, over whether someone is trying to cancel Lolita. Instead, it's the same as the old one: How do you handle the pleasure of the novel, and how do you handle the horror? What is the correct way to like Lolita? In her 2021 essay collection The Devil's Treasure, Mary Gaitskill wrote defensively that she thought Lolita was about love, and that she was sure saying so would lead censorious readers to hurl her book across the room. 'I don't think it's ideal love, it's twisted love, but that doesn't mean it isn't love. Probably the majority of Americans who know of that book would say: 'Yes, in real life Humbert should go to jail, but he's obviously a fictional character and I'm interested to read about him,'' Gaitskill said to The Guardian. 'That seems simple, but for more intellectual people, or people who are loud on Twitter, I think it's become contentious.' In 2020, writer and comedian Jamie Loftus released her Lolita Podcast, an extensive deep dive into the cultural legacy of Lolita. A central part of Loftus's argument was that our culture had gotten Lolita fundamentally wrong by reading it as the story of the temptress Lolita instead of the victim Dolores. 'I'm now far more aggravated with how [Lolita] was presented to me than by the work itself,' Loftus said. 'For me, a close read of this work reveals that Nabokov is not glorifying the predator. I believe it's our culture that has.' Now, instead of fighting over who's Victorian and who's modern like they did in the 1950s, we seem to be fighting over who is alternately righteous and refreshingly perceptive. Versions of this argument over how to read Lolita continue to play out on social media, where Redditors vigorously debate whether people who read the book as a love story are illiterate edgelords stuck in the past, or if people who read the book as a horror story are virtue-signaling social justice obsessives. The culture wars have a way of making everything they touch look the same. Now, instead of fighting over who's Victorian and who's modern like they did in the 1950s, we seem to be fighting over who is alternately righteous and refreshingly perceptive, who is shrill and moralizing and who is unafraid of petty boundaries. The person who might be most helpful to us here is, of all people, Lionel Trilling. 'For me one of the attractions of Lolita is its ambiguity of tone … and its ambiguity of intention, its ability to arouse uneasiness, to throw the reader off balance, to require him to change his stance and shift his position and move on,' Trilling wrote, in the same 1958 essay in which he declared that Lolita is about love. 'Lolita gives us no chance to settle and sink roots. Perhaps it is the curious moral mobility it urges on us that accounts for its remarkable ability to represent certain aspects of American life.' Lolita was written by a Russian, but it is about America, the whole vast beautiful seedy map of it, which Humbert and Dolores criss-cross again and again over their horrible year together. It is Lolita's ability to change shape before our eyes, to shift, to mutate, to show us who we are in every era, that makes it such a purely American novel. The more we read Lolita, the more it has to show us about who we are.
