Wanted, Wanted: Dolores Haze

Isn't it funny--I can't remember the first time I read my favorite book. I remember purchasing it in the bookstore, telling my mother it was a classic and I thought I ought to read it. (and her scandalized face, because the book is Lolita, of course) But I can't remember reading it. I can't remember where, if it was at home in my blood-red room, or in Cleveland, in a dorm or in my apartment or under a tree or surreptitiously in class. I can't remember reading it at all for the first time. Or the second, for that matter, or the third. I can't remember a time, literarily speaking, before this book.

My copy is battered and torn, as all my favorite books are. It's been underlined and bent and written in by many hands. An identical copy, down to my underlinings and notes, went off with J when she went to France, to remind her of me.

J is small, like me, and thin. She has a sweet, childlike face and a head full of brown ringlets. She has blue/grey eyes. Every time, since the beginning, when I read Lolita, she is what I picture. J at fifteen, perhaps, before we were really friends--all legs and arms and faux-bright cheerleading smile. Did the book set me up to love her? Perhaps. Did she set me up to love the book? Perhaps. Is all of this weird and slightly incestuous-feeling? Yep.

I almost always have very clear mental representations of characters. (If I do not, it's usually a sign that I think the story sucks) They are very rarely people I know, and even more rarely people I'm close to.

I'm still not off my Stephenson kick, either, and lately I've been seeing the world in Waterhouses and Shaftoes. I'm pretty sure I'm a Waterhouse--smart, but not the smartest; involved, but not the most involved; a pivotal cog in the wheel that's not used 80% of the time. Waterhouses are history's narrators. They were there. They had a part. But in general, they let the people better suited to doing things do things.

Shaftoes, on the other hand, they fucking do things. They're not always the right things, and they're not always for the right reasons, but they do shit. Shaftoes are Marines, treasure hunters, faithful lovers, hopeless romantics, practical starry-eyed idealists, and generally speaking the person you want on your side in a fight. Shaftoes are the people who change the flow of the world. (When I read Cryptonomicon, all I can think about is how proud Jack would be) Sean's a Shaftoe, I think.