As elsewhere, we are primed to interpret this observation as a comment on the proprietorial relationship of the Islamic Republic to its citizens, especially its women. Yet it also serves accurately to describe Nafisi's own relationship to all the characters that frequent the pages of her memoir, including those whom she calls "my girls" (51). We are told that true novelistic villains, as exemplified by Mrs. Newsome, the tyrannical matriarch in James's novel The Ambassadors, have "dictatorial minds" (249). Nabokov's skill and his "beautiful language" (41) unnervingly lead us into complicity with this monster, who is "a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives … Humbert, like most dictators was interested only in his own version of other people" (48). Here for once, in a text that constantly strives to keep all its elements firmly within its rigid grip, is an irony that manages to be entirely unself-conscious.

XREF: Parallels the reader's interest in how authority operates interpersonally versus institutionally — echoes themes in literary criticism about authorial control over characters.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 240