Julia May Jonas's Vladímír is a compelling debut, discomfiting and riveting, and timely in its themes. With dark humor, pathos and sly references to art and literature, this smart, edgy novel challenges assumptions and forces fresh perspectives.
In small-town upstate New York, an unnamed narrator teaches English at a small college. She lives an easy enough life, reading, writing, teaching, exuding "Big Mom Energy" and enjoying the admiration of her students, whose earnest eagerness for improving the world she appreciates. Then a scandal erupts: her husband, John, chair of the English Department, is revealed to have had sexual relationships with a number of his former students. The narrator herself is quick to point out that these all took place before such relationships were explicitly forbidden. She and John had always had an understanding about their extramarital activities. She is surprised to find that her colleagues and students disapprove not only of John but of the narrator as well, and finds herself increasingly resentful: of John, of the academic machine, of her students and of herself.
Into this upheaval comes Vladimir Vladinski, newly hired junior professor and up-and-coming experimental novelist. Vladimir is 20 years or so the narrator's junior, sexy, flirtatious and married. The narrator is quickly captivated, then obsessed. A two-time novelist with generally disappointing reviews, she has largely turned to literary criticism and book reviews, but now feels inspired to write fiction again. For the first time she feels the work flowing from her effortlessly, and credits Vladimir as her muse. "There was a burning in my body, an extra level of excitement keeping part of me fed and running that required no sustenance. It was longing for the love of Vladimir." She writes, masturbates and surreptitiously follows Vladimir one day and her beleaguered husband the next, and then even Vladimir's wife--beautiful, traumatized, a masterful writer herself. Sexual, romantic, literary and workplace jealousies overlap. Things fall apart: John's hearing (people keep calling it a trial) at the college looms as their already distant and fractured relationship continues to crumble. Their adult daughter moves back home, in dual personal and professional crises of her own, which throws the narrator into new light as a mother. She neglects her work, becoming increasingly reckless until, consumed by her fantasies, she finally commits a shocking act that precipitates a life-changing event for all involved.
That this narrator is a 58-year-old woman is significant, and provides opportunities to consider issues of gender, age, societal and literary expectations and subversions. Her troubled body image provides an undertone from the very first pages, with near-constant references to weight control and her evening skin care regimen. "I prefer to conceal my neck," she confides, as she compulsively grooms and criticizes her body before each meeting with Vladimir. "A man could always make me feel worse than anything a woman could ever say to me," she reflects, as she struggles to align her own sexual revolution with the values of her students. Vladímír questions gender and generational tensions, and the intersection of art and morality within the bubble of academia. In the family, household and larger social realms, it addresses every permutation of human relationship and the relationship between power and desire, while also carrying a strong thread of disturbed body image and issues around aging. In other words, this novel is as varied and harried as life.
As a novel so rooted in English departmental affairs should be, Vladímír is also jam-packed with literary references. Vladimir is compared to Jay Gatsby. "Enraged at my vapidity," the narrator laments, "I forced myself to sit down and read several articles in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books." Insisting she's not jealous or bitter about her own novels' failure to impress, she notes however that "Margaret Atwood wrote exciting books that practically lived inside of a uterus." Vladimir's wife says of her own mental health struggles, that her story is "like Nurse Ratched, like Girl, Interrupted, like The Bell F**king Jar."
Jonas's narrator has a strong, assured voice, incisively thinking through her decisions and the surrounding issues while simultaneously--and with self-awareness--mucking up her life. The narrator and the novel take on any number of thorny topics. Were the college students who slept with John seizing agency and free love in an empowered, feminist stance? Or were they taken advantage of by an older man with the power structure on his side? What are the pros and cons of an open marriage? Is our cultural hang-up about intergenerational affairs perhaps a little overblown? Some of these questions and perspectives are decidedly uncomfortable, but Jonas consistently pushes those edges, leaning always away from easy answers and toward nuance. Vladímír's central characters are rarely likable but they are always captivating; this story harnesses formidable momentum to pull readers through even its most uncomfortable moments. It is a rare victory in a novel to wrestle with such prickly issues and yet be as entertaining as this. Jonas's prose is clear, forceful and unflinching, and highly sensual: food, drink and sex are ever-present and frankly, complexly evoked.
The narrator writes of Vladimir's own debut: "The book was funny, clear, awake, vivid. The prose was spare but the voice was not sacrificed in his exact word choice. It felt both like life and beyond life." The same comments might be made of Vladímír, a clear-eyed treatment of academia and the human condition. --Julia Kastner
Julia May Jonas holds an MFA in playwriting from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family; she teaches theater at Skidmore College. Her first novel, Vladímír, will be published by Avid Reader on February 1, 2022. Set on an insular college campus during the #metoo era, Vladímír is a sensual, thought-provoking novel about power and desire, gender, aging, art and much more.
Where did this narrator come from? What makes for a powerful protagonist?
The idea for this narrator came to me around 2018, when there was a slew of allegations against prominent men coming to public attention--and I was thinking about the wives of these men. I realized how many assumptions I had about these wives (that they were saintly and long-suffering, among other things) and how reductive my unexamined opinion of them was. So I wanted to explore, and perhaps upend, those assumptions.
I started working with this character inside of a play at first, which I ended up putting in a drawer--but the character of The Wife stayed with me. When the pandemic struck and I had a large theatrical project postponed, I decided to try and write prose--something that I had attempted many times but had always put aside when I would be called to work on a play. After I wrote the first chapter in this narrator's voice, I knew I had a novel.
My narrator is a person who is undergoing immense changes, both internally and externally, passively and actively, spiritually and physically. I think a powerful protagonist is always going to be on the verge--someone who is in the process of transforming, in either subtle or (in the case of my narrator) drastic ways--and who is confronting that process of transformation.
How did you channel the perspective of a 58-year-old woman anxious about her aging? That's a perspective we don't frequently see handled in fiction.
Many months before I began working on the novel I had been thinking about desire, in all of the varied senses of the word. I'm the mother of two young children, which brings the process of aging more prominently to your attention (you start doing the math--when my daughter is this age, I'll be this age, etc.). I realized I had this subconscious belief that as I grew older I would desire less, that my vanity would be cured, that I would achieve some sort of docile peace with my place in the world. And immediately I realized how wrong and maddening that idea was--I didn't think my desire would fade, I didn't expect my vanity would be cured, I doubted that some kind of peace would rain down on me from above. You don't have to be 58 to notice all the negative stereotypes that are ascribed to women as they age--from sexual invisibility to being thought of as doddering or incompetent. I'm younger than my protagonist, but I occasionally feel a sense of chagrin when I mention my current age in certain circles (though I wish I didn't). So, I wanted to explore a character who feels a real sense of rage about those stereotypes and expectations, especially given everything she's going through. Perhaps if we had caught her at a different, more peaceful time, my narrator might have been more accepting of the aging process. But given everything that is happening to her when the novel takes place, the cruelty of aging as a woman in this society weighs heavily on her mind and plays very much into her actions.
Do you think of your protagonist as an unreliable narrator?
Only insofar as she is very rooted in her perspective, and every perspective has blind spots. I don't believe she is trying to confuse the reader, or that she is deliberately untruthful--more that she sees things the way she does because of her background, upbringing, generation and experiences, which is probably very different from how someone else with a different background, upbringing, generation and experience may see it. Which is not to say she is right--but she doesn't intend to mislead.
How does your background in playwriting inform your work as a novelist?
I imagine I'm more inclined to think in terms of scenes and events when I'm writing and using them as a container for the other pleasures of fiction (memory, digression, perspective, internal reactions, emotional insights--all that wonderful character development you can't write out in a play). Plays are often about the spaces between the lines (or the scenes)--the unsaid, the skips and the jumps--and I think that informs how I move story forward.
I think playwriting also informs how I think about the rhythm--both in the prose style (As Virginia Woolf says: "Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm") and in the structure--of a book from start to finish. A good play is an exercise in sustained energy (getting the audience to sit happily in their seat for 90 minutes or more). As a novelist, I want to get deeply into a character, to be truthful, to be a good bedside companion, but I also want to maintain an energy that makes a reader want to turn the page. And, of course, being a playwright helps with dialogue, because I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about how people talk, the emotion behind it, what they say, and what they leave out.
What is your favorite part of this delightfully discomfiting narrator?
She was such a pleasure to spend time with, so it's hard to choose. I loved writing her digressions--whether they be about her past, her role as a mother, her opinions about her students, her thoughts on meal preparation, or her insights about her colleagues. I appreciate that wrongly or rightly, amid all her insecurity and anger, she acts. She's flawed--she can be harsh, myopic, selfish, judgmental, impulsive (among other things)--but she also has moments of real self-awareness. She's able to examine her own mind and explore how she might be falling short. I enjoyed writing about a woman, no longer young, who is still exploring her relationship to ambition. And lastly, the fact that she is an English professor allowed me to make many references and allusions to other works of literature that are dear to me while still staying true to her voice.
What are you working on next?
I had a production of a five-play cycle I have written that was supposed to premiere in the fall of 2020. It has now been delayed to the spring of 2023, so development and planning for that production continues, which will be interesting given my now very long interruption from working in the theater. And I am very happily working on my second novel. --Julia Kastner
