Book Review: The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

‘I might be the villain of this story. Even now, It’s hard to tell.’

The Borrower is a bibliophiles dream: a warm, playful and erudite deconstruction of storytelling convention and celebration of adventures in reading. From the enigmatic and immediately engaging first line (above) through to its similarly capricious last line – ‘Let’s say that it does’ – Rebecca Makkai takes the reader by the hand and together you venture into the quirky realms of a tale which is at once both implausible and strangely emblematic.

Lucy Hull is a bookish children’s librarian in small town middle-America. She enjoys shaping children’s imaginations through stories, and delights in sneaking them books she thinks they should read behind the back of their overprotective parents. Yet outside of work she is a little bit lost: she never intended to come to Hannibal, Missouri, at all and now that she has, the rebellion against her father that precipitated it has lost some of its shine. She’s one of those lost twenty-something women, self –aware yet lost, that art finds endlessly compelling.

One morning, she arrives at the library to find her favourite patron – 10-year old Ian Drake: precocious, addicted to reading, and forced to attend weekly anti-gay classes run by Pastor Bob – hiding out having run away from home. He’s desperate for an accomplice and before she realises it, Lucy finds herself accidentally sort-of kidnapping him. Together, they set off on a spur-of-the-moment road trip to nowhere in particular, seeking an adventure like those they’ve read about in books.

Lucy is a borrower of all sorts: not just a librarian employed in the lending and borrowing of books, but an adult who has borrowed a child, and a woman who has borrowed her identity from elsewhere, be it the stories she has read in books, or those of immigration that she has inherited from her Russian father.

One of the things that comes across when reading The Borrower is how much fun Rebecca Makkai seems to have had in writing. (Or maybe that should be Lucy has had, since it is narrated in the first person, and intended as a book written in retrospect). The Borrower is sardonically witty and tricksy throughout, with set-pieces involving ferret shampoo and road trip songs providing frequently funny moment. Makkai delights in referencing and then playing with its influences and precedents. There are parallel’s drawn with Roald Dahl’s tales of childhood rebellion, adventure, and the importance of parents who make these possible – particularly Danny The Champion of the World and James and the Giant Peach - and the permissive whoever you are and wherever you come from undercurrent of L Frank Baum’s Oz books. This is a book for the National Trust’s 50 Things to Do Before you are 11¾ ethos: children being adventurous free from health and safety concerns and over-protective parents.

And yet there is a darker, troubling, side to these recollections. The spectacle of Lolita looms. Throughout, Lucy wrestles with the ethics of what she has done. She may not have inappropriate intentions toward Ian, yet she remains an adult who has run away with a child without his parent’s permission. And because, on the surface the situations are so different, it makes the echo of Humbert Humber’s claims at being (metaphorically at least) kidnapped by Lolita’s innocent beauty, all the more intriguing.

‘It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies.’

There are weighty issues being considered here, but they are raised without being overly worthy and the moral questions posed by a narrator whom one cannot help but side with, even if you feel slightly uncomfortable for doing so. Perhaps it is because we recognise ourselves in her, in her uncertainty in herself, in her idealism, in her passion for books which emerges unscathed.

‘I do still believe that books can save you.’

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Read: January 2008

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta…
You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”

Although I am not a fan of the prosaic, cliché ridden first sentence – it strikes of bad 1970’s porn and bad sex in literature awards – it is impossible to argue that this first page is not one of the most exquisite opening passages of a novel over composed. Throughout Lolita remains one of the most clearly enunciated novels I have read. As with Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov’s use of English is absolutely exact, his command of the language all the more exceptional since it is not his first, or even second!, language. He is playful in his tone, playing word games with the reader, many of which are very funny. For example,

“I have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow – you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow.”

Sadly, the problem with Lolita is that these light phrases are few and far between and separated by some of the densest chapters I have read. The prose is well written from an intellectual standpoint, but so strewn with obscure references and French phrases that it is difficult to enjoy reading. Indeed, if it were permitted by my genetic makeup, I would have given up halfway through. Each page consists of one huge, impenetrable wall of text, short on dialogue, large on the narrator’s pedantic sense of reality.

What is absent is any notion of pace. Taken individually, almost any sentence resonates with style and grace, well written, expressive and readable. But when they are taken one upon the other they merge into one, exhausting collection of convoluted sentences from which there is no respite. Were these pages broken up then Lolita might be a more enjoyable read. Someone like Salman Rushdie is an example of how dense literature can be broken up with a more playful, light and conversational tone which is so much more satisfying to the reader. With Nabakov, the unbroken intellectual weight of every page grows more oppressive and soon your eyes are dropping and you just can’t wait to fall asleep. Each page is, in short, an ordeal which requires gargantuan concentration and perseverance merely to get through, let alone enjoy. (Like this review, perhaps.)

Lolita, if it is to be read with enjoyment, must be approached with an air of timelessness, like a work of poetry, read in small pieces, each word savoured and considered as and of itself. Lolita is by no means a fast and exciting novel which will keep you turning pages long into the evening. It often happened that I would sit down to read Lolita and for the first twenty minutes I would feel like I was getting into it. And then, like a veil descending across the page, the prose gradually grew less and less immediate and my eyes grew less and less focused.

But what of the plot? Surely that is why people read Lolita, to be scandalised. Humbert Humbert has spent his life being tormented by his latent attraction to pre-pubescent ‘nymphets.’ But although he has successfully fought his desire all his life, when he moves to America and goes to board in the house of a single mother, he becomes obsessed with her twelve-year-old daughter named Lolita and can resist no longer. Through a mixture of good luck, scheming, seduction, and unstoppable desire Humbert manages to become both her sole guardian and lover and they embark on a road trip across America. But in securing his wildest desires he begins an obsession which eventually ruins both of their lives forever.

Lolita is one of the most important examples of literatures imperative to offend. Nothing can be due higher praise than a novel which offends against the prevailing decency of the age. And Lolita is probably more offensive today than it was in 1955, with our ridiculous paranoia over paedophiles and paedophilia. But Lolita is not shocking. Nor is it crude, erotic, pornographic or repulsive. In Humbert Humbert, Nabokov creates a dextrous character capable of eliciting sympathy, pity, and revulsion, often at the same time. He also has moments of great wit and generosity and you often feel the difficulty of his situation. Remembering his first love, aged thirteen, Hubert describes his summer romance thus:

“All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh”.

I have not read a better description of falling in love anywhere in any novel. Age is regardless. And the same can be said of his side in the relationship with Lolita. Love is his primary motive. But it is in seeking to control this love, to possess it and protect it, that he becomes so unlovable. And it is the same with any lover, regardless of age. And yet he knows all this. At one point just before his wildest dreams come true, he says:

“If my happiness could have talked, it would have filled that genteel hotel with a deafening roar. And my only regret today is that I did not quietly deposit key ‘342’ at the office, and leave the town, the country, the continent, the hemisphere, - indeed, the globe – that very same night,”

It is this reflective air which I enjoyed. It is particularly evident at the beginning and end of the novel. In the middle, the dense, dull middle, his mindset becomes obsessed, his character thoroughly self deluded and repugnant. And I found this the most turgid of all the passages. For, sadly, Humbert is also a pompous ‘old-worlder.’ In the Russian style of Dostoyevsky or Gogol, he is one of those pitiable intellectual ingrates who assume the world belongs to them, condescendingly hates everyone else and who, were they to piss in their dirty old suit, would need to whine about it and tell everyone how pitiable they are, yet how right their way of seeing the world is. It is this which I hated most about Lolita.

In the end, reading these quotes and thinking about Lolita I am reminded of how many beautiful passages there are and how much there is to laud in this book. But, sadly, I personally did not enjoy reading it.


6.5 out of 10