Professor Swenson has big problems: he hasn't published a
follow-up to his last very successful book; now six-years-old, his
daughter barely speaks to him; and he's having second thoughts
about the strength of his twenty-plus-year-old marriage. Add to
this a talented and seductive writing student who fawns all over
him and begs for his attention to her burgeoning talent and a new
campus policy about sexual harassment that backfires on him, and
you have Francine Prose's new novel BLUE ANGEL --- a tragicomic
look at the small-minded politics of academic communities and the
price one pays for artistic inspiration.The
title for BLUE ANGEL comes from the film of the same name in which
Marlene Dietrich, as Lola Lola, chanteuse of Weimar Republic dance
halls, seduces and then steps her high heels all over the body,
mind, and spirit of a lowly professor who adores her. Swenson, once
his teacher-student relationship slips over into sexual fireworks,
is on a chart for destruction as his obsession with his mysterious
and bravely talented young student takes over his life. BLUE ANGEL
exposes the difficulties colleges face with such teacher-student
revelations and the lengths they will go to assure their boards
that such demeaning circumstances will not be taken lightly on
their campuses. Swenson deserves what he gets: he does get too
involved with Angela, the young novelist, and puts everything he
supposedly cares about at risk. In doing so, he finds a freedom he
wouldn't have otherwise had the nerve to pursue, but leaves in his
wake the corpses of those who suffer (and gain) from the deceptive
power plays that rise from the situation.BLUE
ANGEL works best on the level of a thriller: Will he or won't he,
will she or won't she? Wading through the lackluster tome Angela is
writing notwithstanding, the writing is smart and sharp --- I did
not find BLUE ANGEL laugh-out-loud funny, although there were times
when it did successfully reach for some comedy. The most compelling
part of the book for me was the way in which all the female
characters are drawn so complexly. No one is completely good and no
is completely evil, and for that, Prose must be lauded. However,
she draws some cartoony portraits of academics, which take away
from the satire of the piece as a whole, and the ending is somewhat
inconclusive. All in all, this tale of artistic and romantic
desperation is like a feminist WONDER BOYS --- the aging
professor-writer who finds inspiration and destruction in the body
of one bright student.BLUE
ANGEL is a well-written attack on academic hypocrisy and takes no
prisoners in its criticism of self-protecting, self-promoting
contemporary characters. Prose's fiction is always full of big
relevant questions couched in very readable stories, and BLUE ANGEL
is perhaps her best melding of the two in her long fiction-writing
career.