Vladimir

The unnamed narrator of this novel is a literature professor in her late fifties at a small college in upstate New York. In the prologue, she sits watching Vladimir Vladinski, a 40-year-old junior professor, as he sleeps shackled to a medieval-style chair in her lakeside cabin. The novel then rewinds to explain how she arrived at this moment.

Her husband, John, the department chair, has been handed a petition with over 300 signatures and affidavits from seven former students alleging sexual relationships with him over his nearly three decades of teaching. The narrator knew about the affairs, having maintained a tacit open-marriage agreement for most of their relationship. She does not view herself as a victim and resents the implication that the women lacked agency. Still, the scandal has upended her professional and personal life.

Into this turmoil arrives Vladimir, who visits the narrator's home one September evening with a bottle of wine and a copy of his debut novel. They share martinis and conversation, and as they part, the narrator catches Vladimir's gaze reflected in her darkened windowpane, his eyes dropping with tender self-consciousness. The image opens what she describes as a bottomless pit of exhilarating delirium.

She reads Vladimir's novel and is overwhelmed by genuine admiration mixed with seething jealousy. Her own literary career has stalled: She published two novels by age 43, the first deemed promising and the second dismissed as solipsistic, and she has struggled with false starts ever since. She also researches Vladimir's wife, Cynthia Tong, a first-generation Chinese American memoirist with a major book deal.

John suggests inviting Vladimir, Cynthia, and their three-year-old daughter, Philomena, to swim at their pool. Vladimir arrives with Philomena but without Cynthia, who he says has a migraine. The afternoon stretches into a warm, intimate gathering in which Vladimir reveals that Cynthia was hospitalized after a suicide attempt when Philomena was an infant. After Vladimir leaves, John asks the narrator whether she is in love. A vicious drunken fight erupts between them.

The narrator drives to her lakeside cabin, a modest property she bought with an inheritance. While cleaning, she is seized by a powerful urge to write and scrawls a new story on Post-it notes until sundown, fueled by her desire for Vladimir. This is the first genuine creative impulse she has felt in years.

Cynthia visits the narrator's office and reveals the real reason she missed the pool party: She and Vladimir fought because she learned he had disclosed her suicide attempt to the hiring committee. The narrator is surprised by Cynthia's directness and intelligence, realizing Cynthia is not Vladimir's inferior but his superior. Meanwhile, Sidney, the narrator's 29-year-old daughter and a nonprofit lawyer, arrives extremely drunk, having been kicked out by her partner, Alexis, after an affair. Sidney presses her mother to leave John, but the narrator refuses to be pushed.

On campus, the tenured faculty votes to ask the narrator to stop teaching during John's hearing, citing student complaints that her presence is "triggering." The narrator refuses, threatens legal recourse, and addresses the scandal directly in both classes. The sessions go well. Sidney then convinces the narrator to follow John one evening. They trail him to the English Department building and watch as Cynthia opens the door and pulls him inside by the hip. The narrator is devastated, believing they are having an affair.

A plan forms in the narrator's mind. She steals Seconal, a sedative barbiturate, and Xanax pills from Alexis's toiletry bag and packs provisions into her car. On October 20, the same day as John's dismissal hearing, she teaches an inspired class. Edwina, her star student and a young woman of mixed-race heritage, tells her that John's scandal is "a white girl thing," pointing to how the culture of affairs created a discriminatory atmosphere that excluded students of color. The narrator is shaken.

Vladimir arrives, and they drive to what the narrator tells him is a restaurant. Over lunch, she presents a detailed analysis of his novel, and he is deeply moved. She then drives him to her cabin, where she crushes a Seconal pill into the sugar of a cocktail and serves it to him. As the sedative takes effect, Vladimir writhes and struggles before losing consciousness. The narrator zip-ties his arm and chains his torso to the chair. From his phone, she composes a fake text to Cynthia posing as Vladimir, claiming he has learned about her and John and needs time away.

Vladimir wakes screaming at three in the morning. The narrator concocts a story: She claims they both got very drunk, he asked to try consensual bondage, and they blacked out. She also tells him she recently caught Cynthia and John together. He seems to accept the explanation, kisses her impulsively, and collapses into the guest bed.

Rather than demanding to leave, Vladimir stays. He tells the narrator about his and Cynthia's struggles and reveals that he knows she sent the fake text, since he can see his messages on his laptop. Cynthia has agreed he can have a few days away. That evening, Vladimir makes a sexual advance using a student-teacher role-play line. The narrator is immediately repulsed, realizing her fantasy depended on being seen as an attractive peer, not an older woman in a clichéd scenario. She retreats to the porch in tears. Later that night, he comes to her bed, and they have sex, tender and wordless.

John arrives at the cabin in the middle of the night and discovers Vladimir there. The narrator confronts John about Cynthia, but he denies a sexual affair: He and Cynthia have a "writing club" in which they use drugs to fuel their creative sessions. Vladimir, hearing that Cynthia is using drugs, lunges at John, furious about the danger to his wife, who has an addiction. John clarifies that Cynthia uses very little. Vladimir, subdued, kayaks off into the dark lake alone. John and the narrator fall asleep together.

They wake to fire. The narrator neglected to turn off the cabin's space heaters. Vladimir, returned from the lake, drags her out first, then John, and runs for help. The narrator has third-degree burns on 22 percent of her body; John has burns on more than 30 percent. Both undergo skin grafts and months of rehabilitation. The narrator's computer, containing the only draft of her novel, is destroyed.

In the novel's extended denouement, the narrator and John buy an apartment in Washington Heights while keeping the upstate house. They help care for Sidney and Alexis's baby, born after Sidney became pregnant the night she arrived drunk at her parents' house. Vladimir writes a novel about a younger man's affair with an older woman who dies in a cabin fire; the book dwells on the loosening quality of the older woman's skin, echoing the narrator's fears about aging, and does not sell well. Cynthia's memoir becomes a surprise bestseller and wins a National Book Critics Circle Award. The narrator begins writing again, slowly and skeptically, a novel about Sadie the Goat, a 19th-century female pirate who wears her own severed ear in a locket around her neck.

In the final chapter, a woman in her mid-thirties visits the narrator and reveals she organized the petition against John. She describes how his casual treatment during a formative period left her adrift for years. The narrator listens without defensiveness and tells the woman that everything is still in front of her. The novel closes with a lyrical meditation on shame as the inescapable undercurrent of the narrator's life.