Zadie Smith writes in Changing My Mind (2009):
Just before Humbert Humbert meets Mrs. Haze, the mother of the girl who will go on to obsess and destroy him, his gaze falls on “an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest.” This tennis ball has nothing whatsoever to do with the grand themes of Lolita—it “just is,” and in this is beautiful. (208)
But this does Dolores an injustice, doesn’t it? Dolores Haze does not destroy Humbert, not in any sense at all. To attach to this ordinary girl such power is to deny her truth: that she is powerless in her life—not entirely a victim, because she does have agency—but, relative to the influence of the culture in which she lives and the men who use her (not to mention her mother), she is ineffectual and constrained. The claim, rather, smacks of wish-fulfillment, of an anguished desire to rewrite the novel with Dolores as avenging angel—through her mother, no less—a reading that has been proposed by other critics wishing to grant Charlotte and Dolores secret, subversive powers and a kind of “triumph over tragedy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Humbert injures and abuses Dolores, but he does not destroy her; and, though he laments that she caused him to suffer and ascribes haunting powers to mother and daughter, Dolores was never capable of giving him what he wanted—the “pain of love” he shared with Annabel (15)—and so she was incapable even of denying him, let alone destroying him.
Neither is Humbert destroyed by his obsession. He is consumed with it right up to his death; he lives his “life,” his inspiration, his ecstasy. Nothing, in fact, destroys Humbert; he follows his perverse dream and dies of a heart attack, a pedestrian romantic trope, after he has “immortalized” his love. I hardly call that destruction.
As for the tennis ball, Nabokov would roll in his grave hearing that his attention to detail “just is.” That “old gray tennis ball...on an oak chest” awaits an interested scholar regarding the novel’s “grand themes.”