“When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.”
Vladimir by Julia May Jonas has been described as: A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely debut novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her professor husband by former students—a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own... Like the namesake suggests, our unnamed protagonist develops an obsession with a newer, younger professor at the small liberal-arts college where she teaches in upstate New York.
Unlike Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (which the book in discussion has been compared to in terms of radical similarities), the story becomes more about the anti-heroine’s writing and vanity and dependence on others for her self-worth rather than the individual qualities of her obsession’s object. “I wanted to satisfy my desire, and now I was finding fault with his perception of me.”
The ménage à quatre includes a fifty-eight year old female author and teacher who’s husband—the chair of their department—is being investigated after accusations of liaisons with the students; Vladimir Vladinski, a tenure-track professor who has joined the college recently and is the author of one book titled Negligible Generalities; and Vladimir’s wife, Cynthia Tong, an adjunct-professor at the same institution set to publish a memoir based on her failed suicide attempt.
It is necessary to note that other characters (including their parents, children, and other people at the college) also play an important role in the opinions and psychology of the main character. Almost so much, so as to continually influence her perceptions.
The first-person point of view adopted in the novel rightly satisfies Margaret Atwood’s hypotheses from Alias Grace, “If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.” It is distinctly clear that the main character hardly ever expresses her true thoughts in the form of actions out of anxiety, disgust, and/or fear. Because of this, we are privy to the entanglements in her mind, which with reference to the #metoo movement and other current or continually discussed issues, simultaneously make her a voice-of-reason and the devil’s advocate.
Julia May Jonas’ debut is powerful in the sense that it leads to extreme internal debate, sparking inner controversy. While she is a playwright herself (or maybe, because she’s a playwright), her writing style and form very artfully and very overwhelmingly convey the minuscule details which form our ideas of others.
The book starts to disappoint when studied on the basis of its plot, it fails to deliver what it proposed to. The consistent focus on its expectant flow somehow detaches and removes that esse which makes a novel intriguing. No matter how dramatic the situations that occur, the last third of the book too conveniently compresses all the happenings till then, falling flat in its improbable efficiency.
Instead of leaving us breathless in the wake of its climax (quote, “pun lightly intended,” unquote), Vladimir’s ends are tied up in a manner that suggest complete neglect in lieu of maybe a thought-provoking and unanswered mysteriousness.
Ultimately, it can be said that while Julia May Jonas has definitely established herself as a strong and witty literary voice, she has failed to encapsulate the beauty of fictional plots through words which lie in that je ne sais quoi of their stories.
By Sriya J. N.
@sriyajnaik
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