Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita delights and appals in almost equal measure. What is perhaps surprising is the fact that it does not appal more than it does; a tale of blatant child abuse dressed up as nymphet love with little in the way of redemption or redress. After the post-publication furore, the mythic Lolita figure is the most enduring legacy of the book: sexy, alluring, knowing and only 12 years old, she pops up again and again in popular culture, fashion and advertising.
It was this image of the nymphet that Emily Prager decided to investigate when she wrote her latest novel, Roger Fishbite, a re-telling of the Lolita story from the girl's point of view. Lucky Lady Linderhof, the heroine, has all the time in the world to write her own story as she is in a juvenile detention centre awaiting trial for the murder of a man she calls Roger Fishbite. Roger, a man with a fishy eye and a bite, is first the lodger, then her mother's new husband and finally her own "lover" until he betrays her trust and her affection and winds up dead in Disneyland.
Although the characters have different names, and Lucky Linderhof is a more precociously intelligent version of Nabokov's nymphet, Prager's book is remarkably similar in plot to Lolita. This can cause problems: Nabokov's virtuoso use of language is wholly believable with Humbert Humbert as narrator, while Lucky's turn-of-phrase and knowledge of her own psychology somewhat oversteps the mark for a 13-year-old. This aside, the similarities between the two narratives are probably more problematic. When Humbert outlined his views that certain little girls were flirting with him, it could be dismissed as the delusions of a paedophile male. However, Lucky is also firmly of the opinion that certain little girls are very attractive to men: "What makes one little girl honey to such wasps and another DDT, I must say, mystifies me. I only know I am that little dollop of peculiar sweetness and always have been."
In an era when the complete innocence of the victim is commonly accepted, the suggestion that some children are more attractive to abusers (and hence, in some way to blame for the attention they attract) is somewhat shocking but it is an idea Prager firmly believes. "Whatever about paedophilia, some children just are more attractive to adults than others. Some little kids are sexy. I was a sexy child; men always liked me. I don't know why that is but it's not a bad thing in itself because it's up to adults to restrain themselves. It is not something that the normal adult would act on."
Seen in this light, the book is about boundaries, boundaries that are crossed by Roger Fishbite, and boundaries that are not seen by Lucky. As the book progresses, the reader becomes aware that the cocky Lucky Linderhof is the victim of chronic neglect, first by a mother who drinks and then by the absence of any mother at all; what could be seen as complicity is in fact a need for some form of stability and adult love. "The problem with paedophiles, and this is something I go into in the book, is that in some way thay think they are in the same ball park as their victims, and they're not. They think they're the same size and the same rules apply, although obviously the kick is in the fact that they're so obviously not." Roger Fishbite is a disturbing book, so it is all the more surprising that Prager was prompted to write it by the adoption of her own daughter Lulu. "First of all, in the early 1990s I wanted to write a parody of Lolita but then I thought about that more and I thought `no'. When I got Lulu in 1994 and became involved in the world of children, which I'd never really been involved in before, I began to feel the impact of what they see and what they hear and what they read. Living day after day with someone really innocent, it became a different book entirely, a more modern book."
Lulu, who is four-and-a-half, is the inspiration behind Prager's next book, too, but in a radically different way. The pair are going to travel to China to visit Lulu's home village, and Prager will chronicle the trip in book form. As with Roger Fishbite, she is well aware of the possible pitfalls of the project: "You have to be careful with other people - it's her life too so it can't just be a journalist's endeavour. If we go there and it's too draconian, I'm not going to go further."
The book will also mark a return to journalism for Prager, who has written humorous columns for 25 years. She began in 1974 with contributions to the National Lampoon: "At that time, the 1970s, to be a woman and writing humour was just the perfect thing to be. There was a lot of work and people liked that kind of writing." Columns in the Village Voice, the New York Observer, the Guardian and the New York Times followed in time, but Prager's main outlet has always been Penthouse, for which she wrote for 19 years. "In the early 1970s, there was a tradition that people who wrote black humour, like I did, wrote for girlie magazines. Many people went on to become successful humourists on television and so started like that. So it wasn't as crazy as it seems.
"The other thing was that there was nowhere else I could write these things - women's magazines simply didn't want the things I wanted to write because it made them uncomfortable." The things Prager wanted to write about ranged from the trivia of Fergie and Andrew's wedding to a whole battery of satirical attacks on the American political establishment, from Reagan to Bush to Clinton. "I always like to deal with received information. This is different to fact and it's different to information; it's the information that people get over the television, over the radio, cumulative amounts of information that somehow differ totally to what your own life experience is."
Roger Fishbite is as much a comment on this bombardment of unwanted images and knowledge as it is a Lolita tale. Lucky, a product of her age, refers constantly to chat shows, tabloids and the overweening prurient interest in cases such as the murder of young beauty queen JonBenet Ramsay. "You can't escape it at all, it's on every news stand. I was trying to put myself in the place of somebody who lives with this every day, who is a child and hears about the child murders and rapes," says Prager.
It's a book of serious intent, if humorous in tone, and Prager is a little surprised at the idea that it could be in any way controversial. "I really don't think there's anything in there that would titillate. That would be the worst thing; I would hate that. There are a lot of things you could criticise about the book but if anyone said, `You were trying to turn us on', I would be horrified."
The process of adopting and raising Lulu means that Prager has not written for three years. One unexpected side-effect is the return of her own sense of humour: "I was funny before - I was a funny person - but when I started writing humour I became a lot less funny. You become very dour because it all goes into your work. Since I haven't been writing humour I've been getting to be a funny person again."
Roger Fishbite is published by Chatto & Windus, £10 in UK. In the Missionary Position, a collection of Emily Prager's humorous writing, is published by Vintage, £8.99 in UK