Close Reading: Humbert's Flawed Sex

"Later, in his delightful debonair manner, my father gave me all the information he thought I needed about sex; this was just before sending me, in the autumn of 1923, to a lycèe in Lyon (where we were to spend three winters); but alas, in the summer of that year, he was touring Italy with Mme de R. and her daughter, and I had nobody to complain to, nobody to consult." [Lolita (online text pg. 5), Vladimir Nabokov]

Since the novel Lolita's main character is a child molester, and since the story is set up as an account of the narrator used in court, the tendency to psychoanalyze Humbert Humbert is not one that comes as surprise. By close reading his accounts, the reader may grasp at the reasons why Humbert is seduced so by the appearance and unconscious actions of adolescent females.
It should be known that Humbert can account for his father having "numerous" relationships with other women who were not or did not act as a mother figure to him, but simultaneously ogled over him as a young boy. He also describes his father as charming in various instances. The use of "debonair" in the first sentence of this section, then, is a use that Humbert (and certainly Nabokov) knows is quite excessive. This suggests that Humbert sees nothing but charm in his father, and, knowing that his only attention from women was that of the "cutesy" variety, suggests further that the only charm he really knows how to have is that which grants him cutesy attention--the kind which young girls give.
His father "gave [Humbert] all the information he thought [Humbert] needed about sex," and Humbert's immediate memory after this is his father sending him away. There is a clear spirit of isolation in Humbert's remembrance of this time--though his father may have given him "all he needed to know about sex," Humbert's memory suggests he did not give Humbert the proper support concerning sexuality an adolescent should have when transitioning into young adulthood. This does not suggest anything directly reflecting his attraction to young girls, but it is clear Humbert's psyche may have suffered because of his father's absence.
The final sentence (or half of the prior sentence) solidifies this observation further--Humbert was alone that summer, presumably a young boy with little to do, with newly learned feelings about sex. With "nobody to complain to, nobody to consult," Humbert was alone with his feelings which, at this point, probably began to twist and malign into a flawed idea of interrelations between genders. Surely these traits can be connected to his eventual strange fondness of the youth of preteens.