Then Everybody Read It,
But How Many Picked Up On It?

The Elegant Variation gets into it with Andrew Sean Greer, mostly about The Confessions of Max Tivoli, like the similarity between one passage in the novel and a scene in Lolita:

I remember when I read Lolita I was 16. And I didn’t get it at all. I thought of it as being like a Scarlet Letter. A serious book that was difficult and I got through it and I was like, “All right, I read Lolita.” And then I read it again when I was 26 and I thought “Oh my God, it’s a comedy? A light, frothy comedy?” And then the next time you read it, it’s like a prose poem about America. And then you read it again … But there was that point when I was writing, that I decided – you know, I was thinking no one is ever going to read this book – so I thought, OK go for it.