realthog

"Nabokov did it best with Lolita."

Hum, yeah, hum.

The point of Lolita, as I recall (and it's a long, long time since I read the book), is that, while Humbert is the adult and thereby supposedly the one in control of the situation, in reality Lolita is the puppeteer, pulling his strings; i.e., the adult, despite her lack of years.

In The Reader the setup is a bit different. Michael's certainly old enough, in every sense of the description, to have the affair, primarily because he's not really old enough to participate fully in the emotional aspects of it. He's not going to be harmed in any way by it (although the book implies that he might be affected in later relationships by the fact that his first lover was so overwhelmingly competent, and leading).

Thing is, really, that the book's not about the affair. It's about the affair's very attenuated aftermath,

Hey, The Reader must have something to offer -- it's not every book that'd have me wittering at this sort of length!