Ekaterina (novel)

"Ekaterina" is a 1993 novel by Donald Harington.

Plot

Ekaterina is an exiled Svanetian princess who arrives in America. She befriends a 12-year-old boy called Kenny who reminds her of two young pubertal boys she had relationships with in Russia, Islamber and Dzhordzha. Harington describes the attractive boy as a faunlet, a male counterpart to Vladimir Nabokov's nymphet in "Lolita".

After two months the 27-year-old Ekaterina seduces Kenny and they have sex. A year later, she engages another boy named Jason on his twelfth birthday by giving him an all-over massage in the bath while baby-sitting him. Jason was procured by a friend who asked Ekaterina 'Don’t you like men?' 'Not after they’ve started to shave', was her reply

With the help of a novelist and improbable creative writing teacher named Ingraham, Ekaterina matures as a writer, eventually publishing not only a successful autobiography, "Louder, Engram!" (invoking Nabokov's revised autobiography, "Speak, Memory"), but also several works of fiction, one of which, a novel called "Georgie Boy", becomes a bestseller, allowing her to move from "Stick Around," this novel's disguise for Stay More, the primal setting for all of Harington's novels except his first, "The Cherry Pit," to a hotel in Arcaty, the novel's counterpart to the real Arkansas Ozarks town of Eureka Springs. In Arcaty, she meets young Travis Coe, another twelve-year-old boy, who moves into her luxurious penthouse apartment as her houseboy. After getting the lice out of his hair, Ekaterina invites Travis into her bed – just twelve days after they meet. Travis turns out to be a considerably more complex presence than his new employer has anticipated, and the relationship does not last. Ekaterina discovers that Travis was not a virgin and kicks him out. Travis does go on to star in Hollywood's screen adaptation of "Georgie Boy".

Ekaterina's relationships with pubescent boys constitute only one facet of this character's ingeniously-layered life-story. Donald Harington’s writing is sometimes described as magic realism, but that term hardly begins to suggest the narrative pyrotechnics of Ekaterina, which the author has aptly described as not so much a tribute to Nabokov's "Lolita" as an apotheosis of it.