SOURCE: "A 'Lolita' Tale but without the Conscience," in Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1995, p. E4.

[Goodrich is an American critic and nonfiction writer. In the review below, he discusses similarities between The Folding Star and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), focusing on the ethical questions posed by Hollinghurst's novel.]

Vladimir Nabokov knew very well that Lolita would provoke an enormous scandal upon its U.S. publication in 1958. A teacher so infatuated with a 12-year-old girl that he determines to marry the girl's mother—imagine!

But the novel works, and brilliantly, for Nabokov knew just how far to push his material, how to make it echo with understanding—of the Western romantic tradition, of the tragi-comedy inherent in obsession, of taboo and vice and self-delusion. Humbert Humbert's love for Lolita is pathetic and wrong but also powerfully real, and it's a thrill to watch Nabokov walk the tightrope between pornography and...