Vladimir is a novel published in 2022 by Julia May Jonas. It tells a story partially inspired by Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and mostly infused by the MeToo movement. But there are twists to both influences. The Humbert Humbert-like middle-aged narrator is a woman whose obsession is a much less controversial younger college professor. It is the twist to the MeToo movement that is the controversial part.
The nameless narrator with a driving sexual desire for the title character also happens to be the wife of a long-serving middle-aged professor whose consensual sexual dalliances with the much more Lolita-like female students over the decades have finally caught up to him. He is both appropriately and inappropriately targeted for what can at best be very charitably described as lapses in judgment. But that is where the expectations take a sudden and unexpected—if hardly unprecedented—left turn. The narrator may be looking to have her own—perhaps questionable, perhaps not—a dalliance with Vladimir, but that does stop her from being exceptionally defensive of her husband. And it is here that the novel becomes one of the trickiest treks through the MeToo Era so far.
This is not merely another woman taking Tammy Wynette's advice to heart by putting on a fake smile for the public and then giving him the cold shoulder in the bedroom. (Although, admittedly, what contributes to her complexity as one of the more complicated narrator-protagonists in recent fiction is her increasingly internalized anger at what her husband's actions are costing her.). It is not enough for her to stand by her man, remain married, and not make a public spectacle of throwing him to the lions. This is where the choice of narrative perspective becomes essential. To tell this story using a third-person point-of-view could not be as effective as gaining direct insight into the narrator's mind.
Because the reader is treated to thoughts not only expressed publicly but also privately, the full extent of her resistance to the MeToo movement becomes crystal clear. She is not just resistant, but downright hostile. For instance, she writes of the group of a young woman who has leveled charges against her husband:
"I want to throw them all a Slut Walk and let them know that when they’re sad, it’s probably not because of the sex they had, and more because they spend too much time on the internet, wondering what people think of them."
That is not exactly a politically correct assessment of the situation. It is abrasive enough for some readers to make an immediate assumption that this is less an anti-MeToo novel than it is a pro-MAGA novel. But the big surprise here for a lot of people will be that the narrator is neither a conservative nor a Republican. And she is most definitely not a fan of Donald Trump. She is a well-educated and experienced liberal whose take on the whole MeToo psychology is at odds with all expectations of such a woman.
Vladimir winds up being a meditation on the current state of morality and hypocrisy that is bound to be misunderstood as something else. Just like Lolita was a meditation on the form of morality and hypocrisy in the middle of the previous century which was almost universally misunderstood as being about something else.
