EDNOTE.  Might be intreresting to look into. Joyce Carol Oates wote a short essay about VN maybe 30 years ago in the defunct Saturday Review of Literature.
----- Original Message -----
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello
To: don barton johnson
Sent: Saturday, May 01, 2004 10:17 AM
Subject: itīs not so interesting but...

While trying to discover the source for the word/world game quotation, I found something in the Google about Joyce Carol Oates. I wonder if it would be of interest to the list? News on " childwold"...
 
The text came from a list in a Joyce C.Oates site:
 
 I read somewhere that Childwold is a parody of Vladimir Nakokov's Lolita.  I
haven't read Childwold, but in relation to what you call  the
"discombobulated" form of the novel, I think it would make sense for the
narrative to take that kind of form.  Lolita could also be described as
"discombobulated," and a parody of Lolita would naturally be exaggerated. JCO
is most often thought of as being a realist/romantic/gothic author.  Do you
think that Childwold is troubling because it moves away from these forms that
we expect from her to the "postmodern"?  I don't know.