RFBC Show Notes: Vladimir (and a link to the show)
Julia May Jonas’s debut novel Vladimir is definitely a conversation-starter. The unnamed narrator is an English professor at an upstate New York liberal arts college where her husband, the head of the department, has been accused to having inappropriate relationships with seven students over a span of years. Our narrator was not oblivious to the affairs, and is deeply conflicted by questions about agency and responsibility in what everyone seems to agree were consensual relationships. Meanwhile, she’s becoming obsessed with Vladimir, an attractive, flirty new colleague almost twenty years her junior.
If that sounds intriguing, stop reading now—because Radio Free Book Club is going to spoil the plot for you. But come back after you’ve read it—and listen to Radio Free Book Club here on MixCloud or on Spotify or anywhere you stream podcasts.
Show notes:
The RFBC crew for our September show was Indianapolis writer Ken Honeywell; financial advisor and NFL official Steve Woods; Dan Barden, novelist and director of Butler University’s MFA in Writing program; and Susan Neville, former Butler English professor and the award-winning author of The Town of Whispering Dolls, among other works. As per usual, the show was recorded at Listen Hear in Indianapolis, and our engineer and editor — and musical genius — was the amazing Oreo Jones.
“Spot on—a bit.” This was how Susan described Vladimir’s depiction of the current atmosphere on American college campuses, and Dan agreed. Both Susan and Dan had some specific issues with how students and teachers were portrayed, but also felt the novel did a good job of raising real, current issues.
But is it a good novel? Our short answer was yes: Vladimir is smart, with interesting, well-developed characters. It’s a page-turner. It’s clear that Jonas is trying to figure out the times we live in, and she’s good at arguing both sides of the issues. But we were all less than enamored of the ending. Dan thought that, formally, the disastrous fire did not cohere with the rest of the book. Susan pointed out the similarities between Vladimir and Iris Murdock’s The Sea, The Sea, and Steve noted that the payoff to the promise of the prologue, Vladimir zip-tied to a chair in a remote cabin, was a big disappointment.
Body issues. We agreed that, as a 58-year-old woman, our narrator was far too obsessed with and horrified by her body—that perhaps the character was influenced more by what a younger woman (the author) thought an older woman might think about her body. Dan said he didn’t think there was a reason Vladimir would not want to have an affair with the narrator: She was, at least by her own account, a beautiful, fit older woman.
The question of agency. Our narrator is of two minds about lots of thing, but especially about whether her husband should be held accountable for consensual relationships, all of which occurred before the college where he taught had a policy against them. Wasn’t power attractive? Weren’t we infantilizing the young women in suggesting that these relationships, by their very nature, were harmful? Was the younger generation just less willing to put up with outdated standards of behavior and problematic representations in literature because they were creepy? Or because the students themselves were “soft”? These were the kinds of questions we felt made the book worthy of book club discussion.
Speaking of Vladimir: Can you teach Lolita today? Dan said he “wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.” Susan said that, as a woman, she perhaps had an advantage in being able to teach Nabokov’s great novel, and had done so several times.
The burning issue of the ending. How about that fire? None of us was too thrilled with that development. Our professional fiction writer panelists agreed that it felt like something the author grasped for because the story had to end somehow; Ken pointed out comparisons with Rebecca, which was a book the narrator was teaching one of her classes. Susan felt that the Vladimir we saw at the end of the book was not entire consistent with Vladimir in the rest of the book—that, in many ways, he felt like a different character. And we were all a little nonplussed by the capital-s “Shame” at the very end.
Did the question at the heart of the book get answered? Yes: John’s behavior was deplorable, regardless of whether the affairs were consensual, regardless of the attraction to power a young person might have with a mentor figure. That’s the conclusion our narrator seems to reach—and probably accounts for her feelings of shame, since she was certainly complicit in her husband’s behavior.
Would we recommend it? Yes—and a pretty unqualified yes, for all the issues we had with the book. We all thought Vladimir sparked interesting discussion about issues that deserve scrutiny. And we all agreed that it was a propulsive read: As much as none of us cared for the ending, none of us had a difficult time getting there.
Bonus recommendations: Steve recommended the self-help book Chop Wood, Carry Water: How to Fall in Love with the Process of Becoming Great by Joshua Medcalf. Dan recommended Benjamin Labatut’s mind-blowing novel When We Cease to Understand the World. Susan had a whole different recommendation in mind before Dan mentioned My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell’s novel that has a thing or two in common with Vladimir. Ken name-checked a bunch of great campus novels—Lucky Jim, The Art of Fielding, Straight Man, Wonder Boys—before recommending Muriel Sparks’s classic short novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Next month: We’ll be book clubbing Tom Perrotta’s big summer sequel to Election, Tracy Flick Can’t Win. Read up and join us!
Photo of Nabokov mural by Henry Kellner, via Wikimedia Commons.
