Nothing is more alluring than a mother-before-she-was-a-mother, an unknowable and irresistible figure. — Julia May Jonas

A book on liminality and obsession

I was on what the publishing industry calls “The Call.” It was the official offer of representation from my now-agent, and she asked me to tell her about the second novel I am working on. I explained the premise and, having connected the professorial college setting to another book, she asked if I’d yet read Vladimir by Julia May Jonas. It had been on my radar, in fact it was in the virtual shopping cart at my favorite indie bookstore, but I hadn’t read it yet. After we hung up I selected purchase, and the wheels began turning for my fateful experience of reading Vladimir.

Vladimir is a book about, primarily, obsession. Obsession with a career, obsession with desire, obsession with aging and the female body. And, in its most tangible manifestation, obsession with Vladimir Vladinsky, the new novelist in town.

Man Named Hubbard Reading "Boston Atlas" | American 19th Century Painter

Narrated by an unnamed 58-year-old tenured professor of English whose husband, also a tenured professor in the same department, is facing allegations for sexual misconduct, Vladimir begins with a prologue in which readers are given immediate access to the high-stakes of this book. Speaking of the new novelist who arrives to her college, the narrator says, “He is asleep in the chair, and the hair on his left arm (the one that I have not shackled) glows in the late-afternoon sun.”

How can one put a book down after reading that? Questions breed and multiply in my head: Why is this newcomer shackled? What happens to the narrator’s coveted job? What events had to have happened for this man to end up in her command?

The narrator writes the words of the prologue while in this very moment, looking at Vladimir’s “tawny, well-formed head leaning against the wooden chair.” She is lucid, possessing a crystal-clear sense of what she is doing. “I am aware of this moment as a perfect example of liminality,” she says. “I am living in the reality before Vladimir wakes.”

This is a book by which I was seduced quicker than any other book I’ve read in recent memory. The prologue is, as mentioned, present tense, while the rest of the novel is the time leading up to that moment of Vladimir in shackles. The first line of the prologue is this: “When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.”

I believe this is a nod to Vladimir Vladinski’s namesake, Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita. What I find interesting about that opening line is that this novel, Vladimir, is of a completely different subject matter than Lolita. It is not nearly as perverse. So why the reference to Nabokov? What I think the line serves as is a baseline from which we can compare the narrator in her current state; in her 58-year-old body which conjures very little interest from men. Or, as the narrative unfolds, anyone.

Looking in the bathroom mirror, the narrator notices “the webbing around my eyes, my frowning jowls, and the shriveled space between my clavicles, I felt desperation at the idea that I would never captivate anyone ever again.”

Throughout the novel the narrator prods at her aging body with disparaging words. It is no surprise that she thinks back on the time she used to be of interest to men. Her obsession with her changing body and men’s general disinterest in her leads her to design an awful situation that she cannot get herself out of unscathed (quite literally). It is this obsession that I am so interested in.

Obsession + Liminality

As a writer of novels, I know that when someone asks you about your book, you do not rattle off the themes. Themes do not a book make. Themes are what come out of a book, sure, but what makes a book is character, plot, tension. But the reason I was and continue to be so interested in Vladimir is because of two themes that happen to claw their way into my own work: liminality and obsession. Hence considering my reading of Vladimir to be a fateful experience.

Returning to that liminal space before Vladimir woke up to see he was shackled, that space in the prologue during which the narrator sits down to pen the very story we are reading, the narrator is as though floating in an ethereal moment, suspended between two definitive times: the before and the after.

To me, that is one of the most spectacular concepts to interrogate. Not before, not after. Between.

This liminality lasts for only a few pages, after which the story starts at the beginning, or the arrival of the new man in town. But while the narrator is no longer observing the captured novelist in a state of slumber, she is still in a liminal place, which is to say: middle age. Neither youth nor old age, but the discomfitting space between.

Big Mom Energy

Another component of the narrator’s obsession is her matronliness, what she calls her Big Mom Energy. She self-identifies as “a professor of literature, a mother to Sidney, and a writer.” She recalls the time she was adored by her daughter, the way the two-year-old looked at her “fixed and obsessed, like I was the sun and the entire world, the origin and limit of consciousness.”

And before that, she was desired. She was a child who old men loved. “Nothing is more alluring than a mother-before-she-was-a-mother,” the narrator says, “an unknowable and irresistible figure.”

So, too, is a beloved professor irresistible. But while the allegations against her husband come to light, her students distance themselves and her identity as a professor of literature becomes fraught with self-doubt.

You’ll note I haven’t touched on the husband. To me, the husband under scrutiny was the least interesting part of the novel. I’ll let you read it to find out what happens to him, to this decades-long marriage, and to the wayward narrator of Vladimir.

What I’m reading: The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok and On Writing by Stephen King.

What are you reading? Listening to? Loving? Thank you for reading! Love,

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