Mrs. McCoo

Mrs. McCoo is the wife of Mr. McCoo, a retired man whose impoverished cousin had suggested that Humbert Humbert spend a few months in the McCoo residence. The McCoo family had two little daughters, one a baby and the other a girl of twelve, and a beautiful garden near a beautiful lake. Humbert, imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet he would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish, accepted the arrangement and spent a fantastic night on the train traveling to Ramsdale.

The Fire and Its Consequences

When Humbert arrived at the toy station, nobody met him. Eventually, a distraught Mr. McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down. The family had fled to a farm he owned, and had taken the car. A friend of Mrs. McCoo's, a grand person, Mrs. Haze of 342 Lawn Street, offered to accommodate Humbert. Since the only reason for his coming at all had vanished, the arrangement seemed preposterous to Humbert, who was angry, disappointed and bored. Being a polite European, however, he could not refuse to be sent off to Lawn Street in a funeral-like car, feeling that otherwise McCoo would devise an even more elaborate means of getting rid of him.

Narrative Significance

Mrs. McCoo never appears directly in the story; she is known only through her husband's report and through Humbert's recollection. Her family's domestic disaster functions as a crucial piece of McFate's machinery, the chain of coincidences that delivers Humbert to the Haze household. Without the McCoo fire, Humbert would never have entered 342 Lawn Street, never have seen Lolita kneeling on the piazza in the pool of sun, and the entire tragedy would not have unfolded. Mrs. McCoo is thus a pure plot mechanism, a flat character whose sole narrative purpose is to be the catalyst that brings the central characters together.