As befits the allusion in its title, Charles Foran’s fourth novel is anything but prosaic. Planet Lolita examines the ethical grey area of language and meaning online, and the complexity of personal relationships in a heavily mediated global village, where “pictures or it didn’t happen” has become an unwavering ethos for some.

In a near-future Hong Kong, 15-year-old Sarah “Xixi” Kwok and her upper-class parents – a Canadian mother and Chinese father – find themselves on the same beach as a group of young prostitutes arriving by boat. Xixi becomes entranced by one young woman named Mary, and engages her in an ad hoc cellphone photo shoot. When Xixi posts the cellphone photo on Facebook in an attempt to locate the girl, the image goes viral in all the wrong ways, sparking the attention of an online predator. Xixi’s parents are woefully unprepared for the rigours of parenting in an age of social networking; to make matters worse, they must also deal with the external pressure of an impending SARS epidemic. To top it off, Xixi suffers from a form of epilepsy. (Her seizures serve as a somewhat heavy-handed metaphor for youth hypnotized by smartphones.)

Xixi’s overprotective mother forces her to leave Hong Kong for Bangkok, having also confiscated Xixi’s electronic devices. Cut off from contact with her older sister, a student in Toronto, and her beloved nanny, who has been fired for assisting Xixi in her search for the young prostitute, the teenager has nowhere to turn but inward.

At this point, when the reader most desires to get close to Xixi, Foran switches narrative tacks, first by presenting an addled series of social media posts, then by changing the perspective to an older, male narrator, the head of a safe house for young women in Bangkok. These shifts are jarring, but are perhaps meant as a nod to Nabokov: Foran challenges his reader’s expectations by complicating the ways in which the narrative is presented.

Whether this association is intended is not clear. Ultimately, Planet Lolita is most successful when considered as a contemporary examination of youthful autonomy, and its tenuous yet emblematic jurisdiction over modern modes of communication.