Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
This novel is very much in the vein of another contemporary American novel that I have read and reviewed recently – Gary Shteyngart’s Our Friends in the Country. Like that novel, it attempts to tackle head on a big contemporary issue – here, the MeToo movement, cancel culture and its challenges to the attitudes of an older generation. Yet similar to that novel it seems to run out of steam and becomes something else in the final third of the book, something less satisfying.
The unnamed 58 year old female academic who narrates this novel begins the story with her comfortable life – agreeable husband, successful career, the respect of her students – under threat. She is coping with her husband, John’s, suspension from his university post. He is awaiting investigation by the university board following complaints by former female students with whom he has conducted affairs over the years. Our narrator is aware of these infidelities, seems unbothered by them and admits to dalliances of her own. What she is bothered about, though, are the passive aggressive expressions of concern by her female students and the threat to her position as part of the university’s golden power couple. She is perturbed by the behaviour of the women who have come forward to attack her husband. She understands that there may be a question of power imbalance but she dismisses these complaints. From her perspective, they were old enough and intelligent enough to know what they were getting into. As far as she can see, nobody was hurt.
In this early part of the book, the narrator’s perceptive and wryly amused voice is attractive. It is not hard, therefore, to side with her surprise and dismay at the growing sense of outrage on campus, the hundreds strong petition asking for John to be sacked. She skewers the queasy mix of victimhood and virtue which is the less positive side of the more enlightened attitudes towards race and gender that have emerged in the last few years.
At the same time, another complication is thrown into the mix; and this makes the reader less sympathetic to the narrator. Vladimir, an extremely attractive forty something professor starts at the college. Aside from his good looks and intelligence, he has additional allure as a rising novelist. Our narrator is immediately drawn to her new colleague, who is artfully aware of his own beauty. We learn about Vladimir’s difficult family life married with a talented beautiful but damaged wife, Cynthia, and a young daughter.
They begin a conventional work friendship buoyed by Vladimir’s reluctance to condemn John and by implication the narrator as an enabling wife. However, the narrator quickly becomes obsessed by the younger man. Her latent sexual drive is reignited and she begins a regimen of healthy eating, exercise and beauty treatments to make herself more attractive to him.
At the same time, she begins to suspect that John and Cynthia have begun a relationship. It is obvious that this is a convenient exercise in putting two and two together; and we also begin to intuit that Cynthia, a writer, may have more talent than Vladimir who seems to need constant reassurance.
All this obsession and fragile self-regard eventually morphs into a rather unsavoury road trip to the elder couple’s rural summer retreat. In the final third of the story, the sharp satirical edge and edgy culture wars exploration become subsumed by a story of female sexual obsession, psychological manipulation and transgressive behaviour. The novel lost its way here, in my opinion, but it is quite deliberate. After all, the title is clearly a direct reference to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It seems to ask us to consider what is suitable for consideration through literature and art, as well as exploring with brutal honesty how we should behave towards one another.
Unfortunately, I did not find the narrator’s behaviour believable although I understood that her cool, rationale assessment of her changed life on campus was masking depths of distress and disorientation.