For most of us murder is so foreign to our understanding of ourselves-something we can’t imagine ourselves actually committing-that I think it’s only natural to place murderers in a category as people completely separate from ourselves. Sympathy for the narrator of The Countess was a deliberate choice-not because I believe her when she says she’s innocent, but because I want the reader to want to believe her, if that makes sense. The best liars are people who believe, really believe, what they’re telling you. Every time I read it, it brings me to tears. Even now I can’t stop thinking about that book. He is a slave to his passions-he can’t be trusted-and yet he is as much his own victim as Lolita is, as Clare Quilty is. His life, and the lives of all he touches, are in ruins, and yet he’s able to accept his own responsibility for causing that ruin, and to recognize that everything he’s said until that point is merely self-justification. The end of that book is one of the saddest, most pathetic (in the classical sense of the word) endings I’ve ever read. Just when you think you’ve got Humbert Humbert figured out, he manages to surprise you, even move you. One of my favorite books is Lolita, precisely because it demands a lot from a reader. Bad people doing bad things makes for good fiction. My first book, Icebergs, was about nice people trying to get by in some not-so-nice circumstances, and after spending three long, exhausting years with them, I was aching for the chance to write about some not-so-nice people for a change. Character is always paramount to me when I’m mulling the decision to start a new story, especially a new novel.
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