it's dark, meandering, and fucked up, yet this novel is ultimately less disturbing than i'd expected. it's another of the category in which a semi-unhinged woman faces the void.

the buildup is torturously slow yet masterfully engaging. i read on and on, even while so little of interest was happening, because i felt determined to ensure that the story was actually going somewhere worthwhile.

our protagonist is a writer and professor with a meandering internal monologue, and we spend the book inside her miserable world of academia, her stale marriage with a fellow professor, and her obsession with vladimir, another professor. we are also treated to her disturbingly normalized alcohol overindulgence and disordered eating.

there's a lot here, with the husband and his sexual misconduct charges, which the protagonist defends as they fall in a gray area of college students who consented to sex with their older professor. and there's a host of projection, not only from the protagonist but from everyone; it's natural for us to push our perspectives onto those around us. there's infatuation at odds with eternal dissatisfaction. if she projects all of her own fantasies onto the subject of her infatuation, of course she will lose interest when he becomes all too real.

julia may jonas is tricky, with a reference to nabokov and some subtle self-referential moments. the protagonist talks about autofiction and its validity, so i suppose the novel itself is a meta, ultra-academic piece of autofiction?

she says both vladimir and her husband, john, write the type of indulgent autofiction that allows them not to recognize themselves in their characters. does our protagonist recognize that she is doing the same, working on her novel about a middle aged professor? and then there's cynthia, vladimir's wife, the only one who writes memoir rather than autofiction. it's taken for granted that "cynthia lies all the time," yet is she the only one being transparent in her writing?

cynthia, a young mother who struggles with severe mental illness, is perhaps the most sympathetic character in the book. she is unhinged in a different way, i suppose a more relatable one.

in the end, i was relieved that something fucked up and dramatic does happen; all the buildup pays off, with an extra twist of punishment for our protagonist.

it's an interesting read, but i can't be completely sure of what jonas was trying to do here, and finally i was just happy to be out of her miserable world of dramas and academia.

Ease can be one of the greater forms of freedom.