(pages 127-149)

Hubert’s at a nightclub with his girlfriend, feeling insulted when the DJ describes a ten-year-old song as a “classic.”  Look, if calling “I Predict A Riot” a classic is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.  He is taken aback to see a thirteen-year-old girl wearing an obscene T-shirt.  I’m not sure if the implication is that he’s having a sudden attack of conscience, or if it’s that he’s thinking, “See?  Teenagers talk about sex sometimes!  Therefore I am completely justified in trying to have highly exploitative sex with them!”

Hubert likes young girls because they’re the only ones who aren’t scared of him.  I think he’s mixed up “scared” and “repulsed.”

He meets a PVC-clad goth girl, and stares at her boobs.  He sees her again a couple of times throughout the evening, which makes him think about how fat his girlfriend is going to get as she gets older.  Hubert himself is already middle-aged and bald, but apparently that’s not important.

The band they’ve come to see pulls fourteen-year-old boys up on stage, gets them to take their shirts off, and encourages the audience to ogle them.  Hubert is turned on.  He is NOT GAY, you understand, just happy for the boys because they got to be felt up by older women.

Hubert has a friend who regularly goes up to five-year-olds and tells them how much he fancies their mothers.  Strangely, this friend isn’t in jail.

There’s a bit about women in Russia who resorted to prostitution after the Soviet Union collapsed, and how men would flock to Russia for the chance to humiliate a well-educated woman who now couldn’t get a job.  The narrator (who is presumably neither Hubert nor Business Cat, owing to this whole bit being in third-person) worries that some of these women might have faked their qualifications, meaning that the poor men who wanted to degrade a former university professor were tricked into degrading a former shop assistant or something.   Unethical business practices are a terrible thing.

Business Cat’s wife redecorated their flat while he wasn’t there.  How very dare she.

Hubert once had a dog.  Sorry- Hubert might have once had a dog, since saying anything happened for certain would be dangerously close to having a plot, and we can’t have that.  Anyway, Hubert loved his hypothetical dog, but worried that one day he and his dog would swap places and the dog would be the one to decide where he ate and slept.  I’ve got to say, I’d probably trust the dog’s judgement more.

Hubert’s now been divorced twice.  Big shocker, I know.  He asks his friend how his marriage has lasted so long, and it turns out that it’s because his wife lets him have threesomes with eighteen-year-olds.  This is getting really monotonous.

Back in university, Hubert set his friend up with a girl so that he could lose his virginity.  We find this out in the first sentence of this section, but Hubert still takes a page and a half to tell us.

“The Romans didn’t believe in Justice more than the early Greeks, they simply realized its usefulness.  They realized while a man fights well for something he wants, he fights even better for something he thinks he deserves.”

Everyone is afraid of Hubert, even his parents.  He thinks it’s because he’s become so rich and powerful, but I think it’s just because he’s Hubert.

Oddly enough, there’s now a bit about Lolita.  I swear I didn’t know this before I wrote the last post.  Anyway, apparently Nabokov wimped out by making Lolita twelve rather than, say, eight, because that made the book less shocking, because we all know that all men fancy twelve-year-olds anyway.  I think Nic Kelman might have missed the point of the book.

Business Cat denies that he hates women.  No, you just want to make them into lobotomised sex-dolls who conveniently disappear as soon as they turn thirty.  Nothing hateful about that.