Fiction Cal Revely-Calder
Vladimir, a young novelist, is an object of campus lust, and as Julia May Jonas’s debut novel opens, we find him unconscious and tied to a chair. This interesting situation will be clarified later. First, rewind some months.
The young gun arrives in town to capture the heart of our unnamed narrator, a literature professor in her fifties; at the same time, she is watching the downfall of her husband and colleague, John.
Seven of John’s ex-students say they slept with him, though the affairs were consensual. The narrator also knew, and didn’t mind, but no matter: her feelings aren’t paramount. In a series of darkly comic scenes, her colleagues plot to curtail her career, too, while a group of female students urge her to be a girlboss and leave John. (“Like, you’re this hot, brilliant lady.”) But she’s determined to be her own mistress: choosing to stay, she says, is a feminist move. This awes them back down the corridor.
Jonas’s novel is full of sly satire. It isn’t flawless: from undergraduates to professors, the minor characters are a smidge too pat. But the first-person narrative is beautifully rich, and the novel is playing enjoyable games with the ghost of Nabokov throughout, not just his Christian name, or his novel Lolita, but his broader aesthetic views. He’d have agreed with our narrator in deriding today’s “move towards a populist insistence on morality in art”.
Vladimir isn’t a novel that cares for the taking of sides. The words “snowflake” and “woke” don’t appear – Jonas is too smart for that laziness – and when the narrator compares her students’ cutlery to “pitchforks”, the simile has Nabokovian skill: you’re amused by her disdain, but also catch Jonas’s hint that such contempt may be arrogant. Both the narrator and John are made up of anti-heroic flaws. Or, put another way, they’re ordinary human beings.