Review: Julia Langbein Gets Ruthless in Dear Monica Lewinsky

Dear Monica Lewinsky, Julia Langbein’s explosively funny, transcendent novel, begins with 45-year-old Jean Dornan, a courtroom translator living in New York City, receiving an email inviting her to travel to France to participate in an event celebrating the retirement of David Harwell, director of the Intercollegiate Hub for the Study of Medieval Art and Architecture in Plaisy, France. The email inspires an intense reaction—“[t]he past had been swung into her body like the dull end of a big tree.” Jean attended the inaugural year of the educational program on medieval art at the Chateau de Plaisy when she was a nineteen-year-old sophomore in college. It was a formative experience for her both intellectually and sexually, as she discovered an interest in rigorous academic study while also engaging in an affair with Professor Harwell, then undistinguished in his career and struggling to finish his first book. (The terminology here is inherently clumsy, a fact that the author addresses humorously: “Affair—too glamorous and grown up. Relationship—too stable, with a ship in the word, the inhabiting together of a big, wooden noun. Sexual impropriety—too legalese and small, like shoplifting, like bad manners, like this man had burped at the table with a hand on her ass…”). It was in the cradle of the Chateau de Plaisy that Ruthless Jean was born. This is the moniker Jean gives to the part of herself that is willing to do anything to get what she wants—even when what she wants is profoundly inappropriate.

When the invitation sends Jean into a manic spiral, she is visited by the specter of Monica Lewinsky, whose notorious affair with President Clinton (and its judicial aftermath) were unfolding simultaneously to her own sexual encounters with an older man in Plaisy in 1998. Saint Monica, we are told, has come to Jean in her hour of need to help recontextualize what happened that summer and what it means. Lewinsky’s story is outlined in the book’s opening pages in the style of the short narratives of the lives of the saints in The Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century text that was commonly read by literate Christians alongside the Bible, and which Jean reads at David’s behest as part of her studies in Plaisy. (“Monica Lewinsky was born in 1973 to a noble family of Jews living in the American Empire. She grew up a beautiful and spirited girl and was given a rare position as a servant to the emperor in the heart of the imperial palace.”) The program involves the students traveling to the many medieval churches in the region, most of which are named for saints in the Legend, and taking notes on the architectural nuances. Jean, for instance, is in charge of studying “apertures,” aka, doors and windows.

Interspersed with Jean’s story are more colloquial narratives of saints’ lives inspired by The Golden Legend. Jean’s academic pursuits lend credence to the conceit of Monica as a saintly presence guiding her through the challenge of reevaluating her relationship with David, and the stories of the saints are meant to underscore the violent treatment of women who exhibit strength of conviction. They generally feature women being sexually assaulted and mutilated in a variety of ways, each ending with some variation of “Above her dead virgin body, they built a church.” Saint Monica’s story ends much more optimistically:

“And Monica Lewinsky became exalted as the patron saint of those who suffer venal public shaming and patriarchal cruelty, and she forgave the people with what they recognized as true grace, and they exalted her and looked anew upon her beautiful glossy dark hair and said things like ‘I saw Monica Lewinsky on The Today Show. She’s so smart.’”

Dear Monica Lewinsky is a journey of self-discovery and coming of age, with the primary tension revolving around what, exactly, Jean is meant to be discovering about herself, what Monica has arrived on the scene to help her realize. She initially assumes, and so might the reader, that she is meant to understand how she was affected—that is to say harmed—by the experience of having been seduced, preyed upon, by an adult man in a position of power when she was nineteen. But Jean already knows this, to some degree. She knows she entered into a tailspin after it happened that caused her to squander her intellectual potential and ultimately accept a smaller, less impressive career and life than she might have had otherwise.

The angle of introducing Monica Lewinsky as a patron saint to take Jean on this journey signals whimsy but this device is employed with a level of sincerity that makes it comfortably humorous rather than downright wacky. Jean and Monica take one another seriously, and so the reader takes the conceit seriously as well. Lewinsky is Virgil, capably leading Jean through the inferno of predatory male sexual behavior, demonstrating to her that the power she wields—wielded even in this scenario with David—is a force to be reckoned with, and that Ruthless Jean lies dormant today, a suit of armor she might don at any moment before riding into battle.

The level of detail in the atmosphere Langbein creates in the crucible of the French castle is remarkable. It is such a perfect, specific environment for a young woman to experience a simultaneous sexual and intellectual awakening in. The narration veers wildly through the roller coaster of Jean’s experience with madcap humor, sympathy, pathos, and devastating eroticism. Langbein’s portrayal of first-time encounters with insatiable, inappropriate lust and sexual obsession brings all of these elements together at once:

“What’s so charming about David anyway? Stupid perfect pants, the way they fit. Sometimes, without warning, he will wear a SNEAKER instead of brown leather oxfords and that is infuriatingly hot, the tiniest atomic residue of a teenage readiness to get erections and play basketball.”

Anyone who has had an all-consuming crush will relate to Jean’s feelings for David, but those who have had an inappropriate age-gap sexual relationship will perhaps most of all. As someone who experienced something very similar to Jean at around the same age, I found Dear Monica Lewinsky to be an empowering tool for repackaging the things that happened to me. Langbein captures very accurately the inherent ambivalence one feels as the younger person in this scenario. At times you feel as though you are harnessing your sexual agency (Ruthless Jean!) and demonstrating prowess by seducing an older authority figure. But then something happens that causes you to remember the ways in which you are unequal in the “relationship,” that in fact the only power you really have in the situation is that you could find someone else who has more power than them (a supervisor, a dean, etc.) and tell. But if you find yourself in a situation like this, it is probably in part because you’re the kind of young person who would never do that. One of the most viscerally upsetting moments in the novel occurs when David manipulates Jean by downplaying her academic skills in an attempt to essentially remove her from his orbit and thereby reduce the chances of their relationship affecting his career. It works.

The fact that Jean and David share a first kiss after taking another female student, Judith, to urgent care because her jaw is stuck open, a condition that Jean associates with Judith’s eating disorder, is perverse and psychologically astute. In this scenario, Jean believes she has behaved in an impressively adult manner while helping Judith, and that the kiss indicates David sees her as an equal. The more sinister logic seems more likely, that David has been aroused by Judith’s incapacity, her physical vulnerability.

Jean notes, “When they get to you young, they’re in your blood, in your brainstem.” Experiences like hers, like mine, do change a young person. Like Jean, I’m sure part of the reason I did not pursue a more rigorously academic life was because that atmosphere felt tainted, abrasive after everything that happened. My path might not have been easier had I never had this experience but it probably would have been more ordered, more legible to others. I probably would be a professor myself now.

It’s impossible not to muse about such things in the aftermath of reading this book but I must stress, if it isn’t clear by now, that Dear Monica Lewinsky is hilarious, that Jean’s time at Plaisy is one of intellectual discovery, friendship, joy, and the harnessing of potential, not one of somber and passive victimization. Jean grows close to her fellow students in the program, she blossoms in the academic field, and she advances her nascent culinary skills beyond what was capable in the confines of her dorm, the beginning of a lifelong passion for feeding others. Preparing Sunday night dinners for the entire group gives Ruthless Jean even more room to stretch her legs.

“To cook here, for all these people, is first to imagine the experience they will have, to taste things for and through them—it’s an exercise in fantasizing about other people’s senses.”

A large part of the tension involves wondering what Jean is going to do to David to avenge her younger self. There’s never any doubt justice will prevail, and in a world where it seems sexual crimes and oversteps against young people are barely a blip on the national radar, this is a relief. This book is about pleasure and it is a pleasure to read, even in the scenes where one might wish Saint Monica would appear in a fiery chariot to smite David Harwell into dust, leaving behind a smoking pair of infuriatingly hot sneakers.

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