At the opening of this arresting debut, the narrator, an unnamed English literature professor in her late 50s, is gazing at a beautiful colleague, Vladimir. Almost two decades her junior, he is asleep in a chair. “The sight of his arm hair, ablaze in the sun, sends a sob down my spine,” she notes. The arm, it seems, is “the one that I have not shackled” – Vladimir is tied to the chair.
The narrator then goes back to explore how she got to this point, unpicking the complexities and generational tensions around assault in an American university, the power play between professor and student, the tangles of desire and envy, defiance and shame, ambition and failure. Above all, though, Vladimir is a novel about female appetite – for sex, food, power, success – and what the ageing process does to it.
