Vladimir is a debut novelby Julia May Jonas, a playwright who teaches theatre at Skidmore College. The title character, Vladimir, plays only a supporting role. The protagonist in this story is a fiftyish woman literature professor whose husband, also a professor, accused of having affairs with female students. The affairs are real, and the narrator knew about them and didn’t object – she, too, had extramarital affairs. What makes this novel “racy” isn’t sex scenes (which are few), it’s the defense of age and power differences in relationships that transgress politically correct standards in academia. When I was a child,, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me, is how the narrator begins the novel. The narrator defends her husband’s relationships with young coeds as consensual on both sides and without victims. At one point, a campus petition by students seeks to have the narrator fired as an enabler of her husband’s actions. The narrator handles it brilliantly, embracing the PC-speak born in academia that has become mandatory on the left and deploying it in such a way that it becomes a satire that nobody gets except the narrator and the reader. That is, if the reader dares – even reviewers of the book seem scared to say much about this aspect of the book, such is the grip of academia’s ownership of the definition of transgressive.

However, the transgressive issue is just on part of the context for the story of the marriage. John, the husband, and Sid, the daughter, play major roles. While the narrator is obsessed with Vladimir, a thirtyish new professor in the department and her object of lust (presumably the novel’s title is a reference to Nabokov’s Lolita), much of Vladimir consists of the narrator’s fantasies. The writing is excellent, with great internal dialogue (the story is first-person in the voice of the narrator) and perfectly-chosen details that advance the plot, reveal character, and portray life in academia.

I thought a plot turn at the end was contrived to get out of a corner the writer painted herself into, but that doesn’t prevent Vladimir from being an excellent novel. Here’s what NPR says: