The title of a novel acts as a signpost to the reader, telling us something about what lies ahead. It can be a theme, a setting, a quotation, an introduction to a hero or heroine, some small nugget that might even suggest how best to approach the content inside. From the canon, eponymous titles such as Jane Austen’s Emma, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (or Henry Fielding’s satirical response, Shamela) place the protagonist front and centre, aligning the reader’s sympathies in the process.
Names in titles can also allude to a narrator’s preoccupation or obsession with another. Think of The Great Gatsby, Rebecca, Lolita, characters that prove to be the axis of their respective stories, around which everything else spins, the oil for the narrative engine. So it is with Julia May Jonas’s debut novel Vladimir, whose title nod to Nabokov is the first of many wryly subversive touches in an engaging book about the politics of desire.
The titular Vlad is a handsome, talented writer who has just landed a tenure track position in a liberal arts college in upstate New York. He quickly becomes the object of affection, to put it mildly, of the book’s narrator – an aging, unnamed English professor whose fellow academic husband, John, has recently been accused of sexual misconduct by seven former students.
The natural sympathy we might have for a woman in this predicament is cleverly subverted by a prologue that shows Vladimir drugged and chained to an armchair in a wood cabin some hours away from campus. The narrator watches over him, waiting for him to wake, caught somewhere between fantasy and reality: “If I lived with him, if I were his little wife, I would wrap myself around him and let that snore lull me to sleep, like the sound of a rushing ocean.”
What constitutes a “little wife” is up for debate in this novel, along with a number of other timely topics, as Jones attempts to chart the personal and political minefields of modern relationships. Her storylines are full of nuance, loopholes, granular details that refuse easy definition. For example, John’s sexual relations with students were consensual, they took place in the pre-MeToo past, and they were, for the most part, known to his wife who was the one to suggest an open marriage.
The last quarter of the book veers away from literary fiction into a weird cross of morality tale and domestic noir
A provocative and droll narrative tone works well to unpack these issues. There are shades of Ottessa Moshfegh in the deadpan descriptions – “Becca, a tall girl who took her emotions as seriously as cancer” – and of Mary Gaitskill’s This is Pleasure in the refusal of neat binaries: “If you insisted on infusing art with morality you would insist on lies and limits.” Coleman Silk, the disgraced academic in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, is another touchstone, though Silk is fired for alleged racism not sexual misconduct. Both books feature the ugliness of self-righteous responses from colleagues afraid of ending up on the wrong side of history.
May Jonas is a playwright with an MFA from Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches theatre at Skidmore College. Her skewering of the creative writing academic world – the literary rivalries, the backbiting, the genuine care professors can have for their students – is brilliantly done. There is a pleasing intertextuality throughout the book, with references from Du Maurier to DH Lawrence, to Kathy Bates in Misery, as the last quarter of the book veers away from literary fiction into a weird cross of morality tale and domestic noir that is quite the jolt after the subtlety and eloquence of earlier sections.
The other problem is with a certain inconsistency of character in the narrator. On the one hand, she is an intelligent, incisive feminist, doling out good advice to her daughter Sid, helping the next generation, wishing that her female students “could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them”. Yet this viewpoint is severely undermined by the narrator’s obsession with her appearance, specifically her weight, her horror of aging, her jealousy of younger peers. Even her supposedly bohemian open marriage policy turns out to be derived from this ingrained self-hatred.
Readers may forgive these matters in the face of a good story, distinct characterisation, layered social commentary, all of which are in abundance in Vladimir. It is a book made for these times, an astute study of the culture wars, the hysteria and dogmatism that obscures real debate, what Roth himself called “the ecstasy of sanctimony”. Away from the ecstasy of onlookers, in the private world of the professor and her husband, there is only the reality of lives in freefall: “Most days I thought of him as a problem I would have to solve eventually.”
