Deliberating desire

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This article was published 26/02/2022 (1680 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This morally complicated, deliberately provocative campus novel kicks off with an attention-getting prologue: A beautiful, unconscious, half-naked 40-year-old man is zip-tied to a chair. The woman watching him is an English professor, which becomes clear when she describes the moment before the man wakes as “a perfect example of liminality.” Her students love that term, she thinks.

Debut novelist Julia May Jonas, a Brooklyn-based playwright who teaches theatre at Skidmore College, follows up this suspended moment with a cutting, clever, often very funny first-person narrative that suggests how — and why — a 58-year-old academic might end up tying a man to a chair.

In the weeks leading up to this incident, Jonas’s unnamed narrator, who teaches at a small college in upstate New York, is reluctantly drawn into the turmoil of contemporary university politics. Her husband John, the department chair, has been accused of engaging in sexual relationships with his students.

She isn’t particularly mad at John — decades ago they came to “an arrangement” — but she’s vexed by his accusers. They were adults, she argues, the relationships were consensual, and they all happened several years back when there were no university rules forbidding them. She laments that “young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements.”

As she navigates the scandal, the narrator is caught up in her own obsessive desire for the department’s new hire, experimental novelist Vladimir Vladinski, who has just come to the college with his wife, Cynthia Tong, an adjunct lecturer and memoirist.

Jonas’s narrator is occasionally unlikable, often unreliable and almost always gloriously angry. Through this supple and satirical voice, Jonas explores the subject of middle-aged female rage and desire, which has been deftly handled recently by writers such as Claire Messud and Rachel Cusk.

There is lots of allusive literary chat. Vladimir’s name can’t help but call up Nabokov, the author of Lolita. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s favourite professor, the narrator points out to her feminist lawyer daughter.) A female narrator with no name recalls Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which our narrator just happens to be teaching.

The narrator feels for today’s young people, so pressured by dire economic and social realities, so filled with passion for justice. But she also worries they might be missing something, “being so completely obsessed with whether or not people were represented well, wanting every piece of literature to be some utopian screed of fairness.” She gets impatient when one student dismisses swathes of 19th-century women’s literature as “white lady privilege.”

One of the twisty pleasures of the novel is that we must constantly guess which opinions Jonas agrees with and which are being thrown out as examples of the narrator’s blind spots. As we get more information, we wonder if her marriage is more conventional than she realized, if the “glorious, fizzing confidence” of her youth, when she was so eager for the approval of her older male profs, was perhaps something else. And while she seems skeptical of her students’ references to “internalized sexism,” we see how stringently she polices her own desires — for food, for drink, for sex — how she tamps down her own ambition, how she feels disgust at her “low breasts, rumpled thighs, the loose skin of [her] stomach.”

Vladimir is bracingly smart at the paragraph-to-paragraph level — there are trenchant observations about everything from hipster salads to motherhood to literary jealousy on practically every page. That quick intelligence doesn’t quite carry through the novel as a whole, which suffers from some plotting problems in the last third and loses some of its tautness.

Still, this is the kind of buzzy, bitchy novel that will be much talked about.

Onetime English major Alison Gillmor also likes the term “liminality.”