THERE was no prosecution, except by the critics. "Lolita" left this paper's daily reviewer apoplectic. The only kind thing Orville Prescott could say for the novel was that it was not cheap pornography. (It was "highbrow pornography.") It was unworthy of a reader's attention on two counts: "The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive." Generally male reviewers sympathized with Humbert and condemned Lolita. The novel may have fared well for the same reason; it was after all Lady Chatterley and Emma Bovary who had stood trial. Humbert may be a pervert, but he is not loose.

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It is difficult to imagine a work of fiction causing as much trouble today, when "obscene" and "unpublished" fairly qualify as antonyms. Blasphemy seems largely to have supplanted immorality. Meanwhile, dewy-skinned and downy-limbed, "Lolita" has not aged. How does she do it?

She travels light, without moral or agenda. Her plot still makes headlines; "outlandish perverseness" is us. But art is meant to transgress, to venture beyond what we permit ourselves. On all counts Nabokov's is a deeply subversive work, a humorous novel about a state of damnation, an enchantment and an ache. Sex was always less the point than sanity.