This past winter, I started listening to the book Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas. I didn’t read the synopsis of the novel or any reviews—just saw the name, searched it on Spotify, and pressed play.
Early on in the book, you discover that the main character teaches English at a small, liberal arts college in upstate New York. When I heard that, my ears perked up. As she navigates her circumstances—her professor husband is facing allegations of sexual misconduct from former students of the school where they both teach, and she finds herself lusting over the English department’s latest hire, Vladimir—you learn tidbits about her surroundings. At one point, she goes “down” to Albany to meet up with friends. Another time, she goes for a walk in the state park on the outskirts of town. She picks her adult daughter up from the train station in town and they eat a meal at a classic diner. She buys wine from an Englishman.
A few chapters in, I Googled Julia May Jonas and discovered that she’s a playwright…who lives in Brooklyn…and—bingo—used to teach theater at Skidmore College.
“It couldn’t really have happened anywhere else,” says Jonas, one of the guest authors coming to the Saratoga Book Festival this October 1–4, of her decision to build her story around a small, liberal arts college. “It’s so much about generational differences and the shifting politics of the time that are very present at universities. Any college you go to, you’re involved with those power dynamics. In terms of it being at Skidmore, I didn’t specifically think of it as Skidmore, but I did very much take the architecture and landscape of it.”
The state park in the book, Jonas confirms, is the Saratoga Spa State Park. The diner is Triangle Diner. And the Englishman is William Roach, the wine director of the bygone Putnam Market Wine Room.
Of course, those details are beside the point for the 99.9 percent of readers who don’t run a magazine about the city in which the book takes place. The story itself puts the reader inside the mind of the unnamed narrator, where much of the book takes place. It asks big questions about aging and sexuality and consent and infidelity and feminism, and, at times, will get your heart racing. “I’m really drawn to things that are sticky and hard to parse and hard to see what’s right and what’s wrong,” Jonas says. “Those are the spaces in this world that I find most interesting to explore.”
Vladimirwas originally published in 2022, and this year was turned into an eight-episode Netflix series, created by Jonas herself.
Learn more about Vladimir, its local connections, and the process of turning a novel into a TV series at Jonas’ Saratoga Book Festival session, tentatively scheduled for 4pm on Saturday, October 3.
