Lust on and off campus

By Simon Demetriou

Review: Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

Writers love setting novels on academic campuses, which is fair enough since shoving together lots of neurotic people desperately searching for one kind of approval or another makes for an incestuous crucible of fast-meeting and moving stories. While Julia May Jonas’ debut won’t ever be ranked with Lucky Jim or A Secret History, it does create enough of a swirl of people and stories to keep a reader engaged.

The best of the novel, for me, is its engagement with the sexual politics of agency and blame. This forms the backdrop of the narrator’s obsession with Vladimir, the new adjunct Professor at the upstate New York liberal arts college that provides the campus for this campus novel. The nameless narrator is a 58 year-old English professor, whose husband is the currently suspended chair of the English Faculty, John.

As the protagonist lusts after and constructs a bizarrely elaborate plot to possess the hunky and gifted Vlad (he’s a weight-lifting, salsa-dancing, snappy-dressing experimental novelist cum academic-rising-star cum ideal-husband-and-father), John awaits the hearing that will decide his professional fate.

Accused of having had sexual relationships with students in the past, one issue is that everyone knows John had sex with these students – and plenty more. Other issues, however, are that these relationships were consensual; that they were not prohibited by the college’s rules; that his wife knew about them and was having her own extra-marital affairs, including some with students; and ultimately that none of this matters and John’s removal is a fait-accompli.

These are timely and important matters, and Jonas carries them off with a considerate ambivalence, which is a healthy antidote to the closed ears and raised voices that so often accompany discussions of what constitutes sexual abuse, trauma and empowerment in our cultural moment. However, the rest of the novel is less successful because it veers too often into heavy-handedness and cliché. The sketch of John’s upbringing and evolution as a lothario is cringeworthily obvious, while the narrator tries too hard to convince us that she’s really smart. We could attribute this to the vanity that she admits to, except an intelligent person’s vanity would not be served by spelling out the fact that she has the ability to read and formally analyse books. There isn’t much suspension of disbelief required to believe in a character as an English professor, and most of us have some idea of what English professors are meant to be good at without being told repeatedly. If you can overlook this – and the fact that the narrator calls something that includes tomatoes, olives and anchovies a carbonara dish – Vladimir will reward you with enough peculiarity, surprise and tenderness to forgive the editor who should have known better.