Blue Angel by Francine Prose

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A Review of Blue Angel

Francine Prose's new novel, Blue Angel, is an amiably vicious skewering of the grim reality of teaching undergraduates, circa 1999, and the kind of dangerous place crummy colleges are for anyone who stops to think about anything. Slyly, Prose invites you to believe you already know this story: the "aging professor makes a fool of himself with a brilliant young female student and is ruined while she goes on to triumph" story, a familiarity which the title underscores (referring, as it does, to the von Sternberg movie, which has such a plot). However, Prose infuses the book with the kind of intelligence that makes readers of her incendiary Harper's essays mutter, "I wish I'd said that" over and over. The book makes all kinds of salient, of-the-moment points about publishing (the way a writer is never more sexy and worthy of a bigger advance than when she's never published a book) and gender (women rule academia now, and everyone pretends they don't, which makes them rule it more) and anything else Prose's gaze touches.

—Mark Winegardner

Mark Winegardner is a professor in the creative writing program at Florida State University and the author of four books, including the novel The Veracruz Blues.

From the Publisher

It has been years since Swenson, a professor in a New England creative writing program, has published a novel. It's been even longer since any of his students have shown promise. Enter Angela Argo, a pierced, tattooed student with a rare talent for writing. Angela is just the thing Swenson needs. And, better yet, she wants his help. But, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. . . .

Deliciously risqué, Blue Angel is a withering take on today's academic mores and a scathing tale that vividly shows what can happen when academic politics collides with political correctness.

USA Today - Deirdre Donahue

Francine Prose takes cruel and accurate aim at the current climate on campus in her new novel Blue Angel It is both funny and really sad.

Lingua Franca - Richard Price

A darkly funny look at the paranoid star-chamber world of sexual correctness.

Entertainment Weekly

A literary arsonist with blistering wit, sends up both smug academics and politically correct undergrads in the satrical bonfire Blue Angel.

USA Today

Screamingly funny.

Vanity Fair

Her trenchant satire of sexual harassment gives political correctness a much deserved poke in the eye.

Mademoiselle

Prose is a pro, and this funny yet devastating novel will rock literary and academic worlds alike.

USA Today

Screamingly funny.

Entertainment Weekly

Francine Prose, a literary arsonist with blistering wit, sends up both smug academics and politically correct undergrads in the satrical bonfire Blue Angel.

Vanity Fair

Her trenchant satire of sexual harassment gives political correctness a much deserved poke in the eye.

Us Weekly

A mesmerizing and hilarious tour de force.

Us Weekly

A mesmerizing and hilarious tour de force.

Publishers Weekly

Trust the iconoclastic Prose to turn conventional received wisdom on such subjects as predatory professors, innocent female students and the necessity for a degree of political correctness on campus on their silly heads. In this astutely observed, often laugh-aloud funny and sometimes touching academic comedy, she proves more skeptic than cynic, with an affection for her central character that is surprisingly warm. He is Ted Swenson, a happily married and reasonably content novelist who teaches creative writing at a much less than Ivy League college in darkest Vermont. Stuck on his own latest book, he is nevertheless charmed and intrigued by the writing skills of the unlikely, ungainly and punky Angela Argo. (Prose takes the considerable risk of offering chunks of Angela's work, and the reader can see in it what poor Ted does.) Out of the best intentions--and an only half-acknowledged but not compelling concupiscent itch--he encourages the girl, who is soon hanging on his every word of praise and hinting that if only Ted's editor could see her work... One moment of lustful madness that is not even consummated (a broken tooth intervenes), a disinclination of Ted's editor to see Angela's novel-in-progress and Ted's goose is cooked. Suddenly, every tiny hint of lechery or unfairness toward his students, an outburst at an unbearable dinner party, a kindly gesture are all evidence against him, dragged out in a climactic academic hearing that is at once farcical and horribly realistic. A slightly indeterminate ending--for where does poor Ted, sans wife and job, go from here?--is the only minor blemish on a peerlessly accomplished performance, at once tinglingly contemporary and timelessly funny. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

Prose's latest novel charts the downward spiral of a creative writing professor caught up in a sexual harrassment scandal. The years ago, Ted Swanson wrote a major novel about growing up with a crazy father who later killed himself. Now Swanson's blocked on a new novel with a contrived plot and hasn't written anything in years. An autobiographical writer in the throes of a mid-life crisis, he feels he's suffocating in his comfortable, boring job at a small New England college, stuck with a predictable wife, a sullen daughter, and a life that offers him nothing to write about. So he becomes entranced by his most talented student, Angela, a girl with numerous facial piercings who can spin a page-burning novel out of her imagination. Soon, Angela's story of a young girl who becomes involved with a teacher seems to be coming true. Is Swenson lured by her to be coming true. Is Swenson lured to her writing talent, or is Angela entrapping him to conduct research? Prose interestingly juxtaposes questions of life and art with issues of complicity and harrassment. Like the professor's debasement in the Marlene Dietrich film of the same name, Swenson's impending entanglement is compelling and fascinating to behold. Recommended for all fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/99.]-Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisburg, VA

School Library Journal

YA-Professor and novelist Ted Swenson's life is just about perfect. The publication of a well-received novel years earlier earned him a light teaching load at his small college, and if his fiction-writing students show little talent, that means there's plenty he can teach them. His troublesome daughter has left for college, and he and his wife are enjoying their cozy country home, where Swenson occasionally-very occasionally-works on his long-overdue second book. Enter Angela Argo, a quiet young woman with orange-and-green hair, multiple facial piercings, a dog collar, and more talent than he's ever seen in a student. Swenson's feeling generous-he'll take some time from his unbusy life and give her a little extra attention. The fact that the subject of her novel is a student with a crush on her teacher makes him a little nervous, but it's not like he's going to have an affair with her. He wouldn't do anything that stupid and besides, he loves his wife-. Prose's tightly written satire of college life and its new code of morality will have sophisticated teens laughing out loud. They might also do some serious thinking about love and sex, and about the many ways people can fall prey to one another. Note: the cover photo of a girl's exposed buttocks can be more problematic than the book itself.-Jan Tarasovic, West Springfield High School, Fairfax County, VA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Newsweek - Jones

This is a blisteringly funny yet compassionate novel about making bad decisions. As for the author, she never makes a false move.

The New York Times - Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

What makes Prose's story particularly gripping and outrageous is how much you care for Swenson...

The New York Times Book Review - Sage

There is a way of getting inside your characters that renders them intimately known and comprehensively exposed -- at once privileged and gutted -- and Francine Prose is very good at it...Once you start reading it, you'll be hooked.

What People Are Saying

Russell Banks
Blue Angel is a smart-bomb attack on academic hypocrisy and cant, and Francine Prose, an equal-opportunity offender, is as politically incorrect on the subject of sex as Catullus and twice as funny. What a deep relief it is, in these dumbed-down Late Empire days, to read a world class satirist who's also a world class story-teller.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0060882034
  
• ISBN-13: 9780060882037
• Format: Paperback, 344pp
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Pub. Date: February 2006
• Edition Description: with P.S.
• Sales Rank: 99,945
• Series: P.S.

• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Interviews & Essays

Sometimes you just know someone is going to be fabulous.

The first hint that I would be as enchanted with author Francine Prose as I was with her new novel, Blue Angel, came when I called her to set up our interview. While trying to choose a meeting place where our conversation wouldn't be overwhelmed by clattering background noise, Prose offered without hesitation, "We can do it at my place." And then there was her place. Upon entering the home of Francine Prose, you are immediately aware that it is the abode of artists. Glorious paintings are perfectly arranged on the living room and—not to sound too new-agey here—the energy of the apartment is palpable. I didn't know at the time that her husband is a painter, but I probably should have guessed. (Anyone who reads Blue Angel would be safe in assuming that he is not a university administrator.)

In her new novel, Blue Angel, prose gleefully satirizes the current state of academic political correctness with provocative insight and impressive humor. Chock-full of hilarious, indelible scenes of academic life, Blue Angel chronicles the professional and personal undoing of a middle-aged creative writing professor, Ted Swenson, at the hands of a talented and seductive student.

I asked her why she chose to write about the politics of academic life—in particular, the vexing modern phenomenon of political correctness.

"Well, I teach, so I'm often in the middle of that. Fortunately, creative writing departments usually don't have that much to do with academic departments. But I know it's there. It filters back through my students. My students go to these terrible literature classes, and they come up with these nutty ideas about what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do in writing. It's heartbreaking."

For example?

"They think, 'Oh, I can't really write a female character who's not incredibly self-activated and independent and together because I will be contributing to the oppression of women.' Well, no. You're actually just writing a character."

These days, Prose teaches at the New School, an experience she describes as "a dream." The New York City-based college is a far cry from the fictional setting of Blue Angel, a small, remote liberal arts school called Euston College. "Schools like Euston terrify me," she says. "With one moment of inattention, you lose your job."

Fear of losing one's job surfaces early in Blue Angel, when Ted Swenson, a creative writing teacher and novelist struggling to follow up his earlier success, is summoned to a mandatory meeting in which Euston College's policy on sexual harassment is being reviewed for the entire faculty and staff. As Swenson settles into his auditorium seat, he can't help but wonder if the increasingly bizarre sexual content of his students' writing could actually jeopardize his job. His feelings of concern, bordering on paranoia, are ones with which many professors can empathize. Prose explains that classroom sensitivity is so heightened that even she finds herself acting on the side of caution.

"If I go into a class to teach a story like Beckett's 'First Love,' I'll [tell the class] that there's some dicey sexual material, and if anyone feels threatened by that, just don't show up for class that day. Why should I have to do this? It's a masterpiece of literature."

After reading Blue Angel, it's hard to imagine that anyone who likes to say what she truly thinks could ever be successful within the politics of academia.

"I don't have a real teaching job, and it's not accidental," Prose tells me happily. "After this book comes out, it might be impossible. On the other hand, I do have friends who teach who are just like me, and they've survived. They've managed. So I think, like with everything else, you just have to be careful what you say."

When a writing teacher isn't dodging the bullets of political correctness, there's always the issue of whether or not creative writing can actually be taught. Prose explains, "You can certainly teach people to edit their own work. You can teach people to pay attention to language. But you can't teach talent. Who knows what that is? The irony is that the really gifted ones don't need you at all and probably shouldn't be there."

Prose's first book, Judah The Pious, was published in 1973. She wrote the majority of the novel during a year spent living in India, after having left what she regards as a disastrous turn in a Harvard graduate program. Now, some 11 books later, Prose feels she has finally reached a new level of control over her craft.

"I don't think people make steady progress," she explains. "For example, I think my third and my fourth books were really worse than my first and second books. Now I feel like I'm actually learning to do some things that I wish I'd known 11 books ago! I have a much clearer sense of how to construct a plotline. You just get it little by little. And you learn how to do certain technical things. You learn what you can do without—that you don't have to over-explain, that you can trust the reader."

And the reader can certainly trust Francine Prose. She is clearly in control of Ted Swenson—every nuance of his thoughts and actions hits the right note. When I comment on her pitch-perfect portrayal of her hapless professor, she almost makes it sound easy: "He was so much fun! Also, I have to say that writing from the male point of view really helped. It was so liberating. I felt I had a certain distance from it and I could just go nuts and let him go nuts."

As Swenson gradually unravels, his wife, Sherri, can only collect her dignity and move out of the way. Like many marriages, the Swenson's survived years of ups and downs only to come unglued over a single, avoidable, and pathetic mistake. I asked Prose if most marriages are inherently doomed, subject to the frailties of men and women.

"I hope not! I'd like mine to last. Swenson is a guy who's looking to take a big fall; he just doesn't know it. And as far as Angela goes—Swenson's love and nemesis—anybody who teaches would know that a student like that is big trouble. And the fact that Swenson is drawn to her—it's a kind of death wish. So I don't think it's about the impossibility of marriage, I think it's about this guy who gets to a certain point and just wants to pull the plug on his whole life and finds this particular way of doing it."

Swenson begins to realize what he's doing, what role he has cast himself in his own life, as he watches the 1930s Marlene Dietrich film The Blue Angel.

"The strangest thing about writing this novel is that I was having lunch with my previous editor, and they asked what my next project was going to be. I had no idea but I said, 'I'm going to write this novel based on "The Blue Angel," set in a creative writing classroom.' It was like an out-of-body experience. I had seen the movie 15 years before. Then I watched it about ten times during the course of writing. I don't know, I think I'm always writing about obsession in a certain sense, and it's a movie about obsession. And I'd been thinking about academia, and the main character is a professor, so, how perfect."

So is sexual attraction between teachers and students merely the stuff of novels and films, or is this dynamic prevalent in real academic life? Prose says that sexual attraction between teachers and students is not only common, it's a good thing.

"I don't think that means you sleep with your students—I think that's terrible. But I think, Who were the teachers you learned from in school? The ones you had big crushes on. Why do you want to please teachers? Is it simply because you love the subject so much? Sometimes, but not always."

If the sexual obsession depicted in Blue Angel were to make its way onto the big screen, Prose knows who would be her leading man and his Lolita: "Nick Nolte, definitely to play Swenson, and Angelina Jolie [for Angela]."

The role Prose finds herself playing these days can best be described as spokesperson for the obvious. Her recent article in The New York Times Magazine, "A Wasteland of One's Own," in which she criticized the poor quality of web sites, television, and movies geared for women, was met with a flood of responses. Women indicated that her article echoed the dissatisfaction they, too, felt with the products of mass media, a frustration that had yet to be formed as a public sentiment. Recalling the responses she read, Prose says, "I was really very moved by most of them. The Times did an online forum about it, and they got dozens of responses and sent some letters to me, and I did a couple of call-in talk shows. There were all these women saying, 'I never liked this stuff!'"

How does she decide what to write about? "In general, I like pieces that make me think about things that I wouldn't ordinarily have thought about. I liked the New York Times assignment because I don't think I would have gone on to ivillage.com or oxygen.com without someone saying, 'Go look and see.' That whole world of marketing to women...I certainly wouldn't have gone to see [the movie] 'Hanging Up' if they hadn't sent me!"

But stating the so-called obvious is not always easy. There are plenty of people who don't want to hear it. Fortunately for us, Prose is not easily deterred. "I joke about stating the obvious—and while it's always seemed like a handicap to have a compulsion to say the thing that everyone knows and no one will say, I've finally found a way to make it work."

—Jamie Brenner

Jamie Brenner is a freelance writer living in New York City.

Reading Group Guide