The Pitch: It's like Annabel Lee Meets Double Indemnity!  

"You could see anything that way," remakred Charlotte coquettishly.

Jean sighed.  "I once saw," she said, "two children, male and female, at sunset, right here, making love.  Their shadows were giants.[...]

An important image, it echoes (and Lolita is a novel filled with echoes; perhaps to point to the narcissism at the root of Humbert's evil) Humbert's childhood embrace of Annabel, which he attributes to his fixation on the nymphet--in short, the incident that casts its own giant shadow on his life.  But it's also a famous image in Gravity's Rainbow--Slothrop and Geli Tripping making love on the edge of a mountain range, their shadows spread over the clouds like giants (I think, with a bit of fast poking around on this great Pynchon site, that it's the place of the "God-shadows" ("Brockengespenstphänomen")) .

I don't know where to go with this yet, if anywhere.  It would be interesting if Pynchon took the image deliberately from Lolita both as tribute (Nabokov was his literature teacher at Cornell) and as thematic concern--not only is there a nymphet in Gravity's Rainbow, but it's pretty easy to make the case that a narcissism similar to Humbert's is at the core of Slothrop's character, which in the end undoes him.

I dunno.  And now there's work.  Crap.

***

Okay, and now I'm back.  Just finished reading the pretty stupendous review of Gravity's Rainbow by Richard Locke in the New York Times Book Review that put GR on the map.  Written thirty years ago, right after the publication of the novel, it's a very intelligent and largely on-point critique.    I'd ended up there after a search for the word used often in conjunction with the book, a word I couldn't quite recall.  Fortunately, it's tucked right in the middle of a pretty keen description of Pynchon's work to that pont:

The operative emotion behind Pynchon's literary creations is not Nabokovia nostalgia but a fear of the void, which Pynchon converts into the very semblance of megalomaniac paranoia, the construction of plots and counterplots, epic catalogues, unifying symbols and metaphors, intense verbal energy, detailed descriptions of natural and man-made environments, local life styles, manic good times, college humor and rowdiness leading to drunken and drugged orgies, sexual perversions and reversals of role, and finally to an obsession with the sado-masochistic conversion of human flesh to mechanical contrivance, dead matter.

The catalogue--right, that's the word I was looking for.  Before the work showed up, I was trying to form a train of thought (which the aphasia did not help, surprisingly) about the continuing reference to Gravity's Rainbow as a catalogue--much in the same way Ulysses is a catalogue.  Until I hit this paragraph (from which it's reasonable to assume this idea sprang), I'd wondered what exactly GR was a catalogue was of: my encounter of it in the context of Ulysses was in a discussion of the section where symbols for each of Shakespeare's work appeared in the text.  Since then, if I see more than two literary allusions, I break out a watchful eye to see if a novel falls under the "catalogue" theory.  (My secret theory is that David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is precisely this sort of catalogue, with allusions ranging through all of what we might call "modern literature," starting at Hamlet, running through Tristram Shandy, Miss Lonelyhearts, Gravity's Rainbow, End Zone and a lot of others I'm either not remembering or not noticing.)

So the idea that Gravity's Rainbow might indeed be a similar catalogue, with at least one heavily embedded reference to Lolita...well, it just gets my tiny brain a'whirring.  Enough to completely swamp this post about re-reading Nabokov's Lolita, I'm afraid.  So lemme sum it up real quick in closing:  Nabokov's Lolita.  It's really, really good.