VLADIMIR by Julia May Jonas

This novel made me think of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.  As in Albee’s play, the plot focuses on two couples, all four of whom write and teach at a small, pricey New England college—upstate New York, in this case.  The first-person unnamed narrator here is the wife in the older of the two couples.  She and her husband have an open marriage, but he is facing possible termination due to a series of affairs he had with female students, some of whom have filed grievances.  To be clear, these occurred before the college outlawed such relationships, and all of these students were consenting adults.  The narrator merely shrugs off her husband’s infidelities, because she has had several flings of her own.  Now her lustful imagination is going wild over a new professor named Vladimir, and a teaser at the beginning of the novel hints at weird things to come.  The narrator goes completely off the rails, but the only consequences she suffers are for seemingly being complicit in her husband’s sexual peccadilloes.  As in the Albee play, this is a boozy bunch, but I don’t mean to sound judgmental.  In fact, one major theme here is that one couple’s marriage contract should not be the subject of speculation or disapproval by outside parties.  I agree wholeheartedly with their right to choose the parameters of their marriage, even if theirs is not the type of marriage that most of us want for ourselves.  In any case, this is what good writing looks like, and the author kept me engaged throughout.  However, the editing sorely needs some grammatical improvement.  For example, on page 190, a sentence begins with this phrase:  “The thought of he and Sid and Alexis all working together.”  Ouch.  That makes my teeth hurt.