Title: Brilliantly Perverse
Review: The comparisons of Allan Stein to Lolita are inevitable:The obsession with the adolescent, the furtive criminalinevitability, the bathetic conclusion all call one to mindfrom the other.Aside from Stadler's prose being more engaging than Nabokov'sand his protagonist less sinister, these are books withvery different purposes. Stadler plays extensively on theduplicity of identity: he almost induces a mild vertigoin the process. His eroticism is sincere and the fidelityto place in his descriptions is evocative.Paradoxically, by keeping the self-reflection to a minimum,we learn more about the protag's motivation in this story thanwe ever do in Lolita. The perversity is that Stadler's protagends up being less vocal but still more fully human than Nabokov's.Lynn Hoffman author bang BANG: A Novel
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