Vladimir

The narrator is a 58-year-old English professor at a small liberal-arts college in upstate New York whose husband John, also a professor and the department chair, is facing a Title IX investigation for consensual affairs with former students. As the campus reckons with John publicly, she becomes fixated on Vladimir Vladinski, a 40-year-old novelist newly hired into the department, and begins a plan to seduce him into a scenario where the power roles are inverted. The book is her first-person account of that summer, written in the same cool literary register the narrator wields against everyone around her.