Sarah Weinman is a crime writer who has seriously researched the Nabokov connection. Her book provides extensive background for the Horner story: Among the many people she tracks down are one of Horner’s nieces and a neighbor who was instrumental in Sally’s rescue. The achievement of her impressive literary sleuthing is to bring to life a girl whose story had been lost. And she provides documentation of Nabokov’s use of the case, demonstrating that the writer, long fascinated with the essential paradigm of middle-aged men obsessed with young girls, was well into writing “Lolita” when he encountered the real-life story of Sally Horner and incorporated details of it into his novel, something he would later deny or downplay.

Weinman takes pains to address the virtual lack of empathy with Sally in the critical coverage of Nabokov’s fiction, noting that Vera Nabokov was concerned about this in the wake of the success of “Lolita.” “One subject bothered her above all: the way that public reception, and critical assessments, seemed to forget that there was a little girl at the center of the novel, and that she deserved more attention and care: ‘I wish someone would notice the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence upon the monstrous HH, and her heart-rending courage all along.’”

But if Vera believed her husband understood the situation from Dolly’s point of view, the reader is not apt to agree. Humbert Humbert is racked by guilt and sorrow, by recollections of his passion for “Lo,” but he is also filled, one feels, with satisfaction at his own literary genius. There is very little about the novel that reveals Dolly’s thoughts and emotions.

In “Rust and Stardust,” T. Greenwood sets herself the task of dramatizing Sally’s experience, attempting to fill in those missing feelings and reactions, as well as those of her family and friends. “I have taken many, many liberties with both character and plot,” Greenwood admits. There was, for example, no such person as the nice nun, Mary Katherine, who when she can’t persuade her superiors to share her concern about the dreamy, motherless girl in her class, vows to devote herself in the future to the welfare of abused children. Did the real Frank LaSalle give Sally a puppy? What was the actual social level of the Horners? Theirs was a world of trailer parks and cheap motels (as in “Lolita”) but while Greenwood has them talk like characters out of Steinbeck (“I wanna see that picture,” Sally said. “I know I ain’t nearly as glamorous as that girl Lena,” says someone else), Weinman and Nabokov employ a higher level of diction. What were these vanished people really like? Unlike Greenwood, Weinman restricts herself to what can be known and labels what is speculative as such.

Some readers (myself included) are troubled by fictionalizations, although we find ourselves caught up by them all the same. Yet since Nabokov’s day, as we come to understand more about the artistic process, the unconscious and the nature of “inspiration,” we have realized that no work of art is unrelated to the factual world. Even if Nabokov refined and dreamed the events of his novel, in the process turning it into art, our understanding of the convergence of fiction and life has changed. We know that Sally Horner’s experience was only too horrifyingly real. Fictional versions of actual events raise the salient question of our day: the role of truth. And, of course, whether we value it.