Old Dog, New Tricks. - Review - book review

National Review, May 22, 2000 by Elizabeth Powers

Blue Angel, by Francine Prose (HarperCollins, 314 pp., $25)

OVER 2,000 years ago, Plato's Phaedrus warned of the erotic temptations that beset educators seeking to impart knowledge to young, impressionable minds. The sexual-harassment inquests that roil con temporary college campuses seem to suggest we have learned nothing from such insights. Yet higher education today is clearly a less exalted activity than during the Socratic age. And the radical realignment of the relations between the sexes (or should that be "genders"?) during the last half-century has only muddled things further. It is this volatile mix of postmodern sexual politics and age-old longings that Francine Prose so deftly portrays in her new novel.

Its protagonist, Ted Swenson, is a burnt-out case. Many years before the novel begins, he transformed his court ship with his wife-to-be into his first novel, Blue Angel. His father's suicide, an on-national- TV incineration dur ing the Vietnam War, yielded material for Phoenix Time, his second, even more successful novel.

Since those moments of literary fame, Swenson (as he is called throughout this present-tense novel) has re treated into writer's block and to the hallowed halls of a pricey but mid-level New England college. En sconced in a literature department beset with academic acrimony, he goes through the motions of teaching creative writing. The students, who have sucked in politically correct pieties with their mother's milk, have nonetheless never heard of Louisa May even when their last name happens to be Alcott. Swenson's own college-age daughter speaks the language of crisis counselors.

Though Swenson is still very much in love with his wife and has never committed an indiscretion with a student in 20 years of teaching, things are about to change. As suggested by the title of this novel-a reference to the 1930 Marlene Dietrich/Emil Jannings film The Blue Angel-the professor will lose his senses, in this case over a student And, as in the film (and in the 1905 Heinrich Mann novel Professor Unrat, on which the film was based), the object of the professor's devotion is something of a tramp. Swen son's amour fou is Angela Argo, a "skinny, pale redhead with neon-orange and lime-green streaks in her hair and a delicate, sharp-featured face pierced in a half-dozen places."

Yet Angela's writing is so good that Swenson finds himself obsessed with her, an attraction that is more literary than sexual. (Similarly, in Heinrich Mann's novel, Professor Unrat keeps referring to the burlesque dancer he is smitten by as "the artist.") Again, real life precipitates fiction: Angela writes a novel that feeds off of Swenson's life, "like Lolita rewritten from Lolita's point of view." It also brings publishing success, as Angela lands a fat contract from Swenson's high-powered New York editor. (Aren't they all high- powered in novels?)

Swenson, however, cast as predator by the weak-nerved academic powers that be, loses everything. Angela accuses him of sexual harassment, and in the hearing that follows his degradation is laid bare. The hypocrisy of these proceedings is manifest: Among those who give incriminating evidence is a fellow member of Swenson's department who for years, "as faculty adviser to the [college's] Gay Student Alliance, dated its best-looking guys."

This is Francine Prose at her best. She is a storyteller in a traditional mode, which means that readers will find themselves swept along by her expert narrative pace, just as Ted Swenson is swept into duplicity and self-denial. It is with an intense feeling of dread that you observe him betray the people who care most about him. And anyone who has spent much time at a small liberal-arts college will certainly derive grim pleasure in recognizing the rarefied habits of people who occupy these intensely parochial settings: the ambiguous bonhomie of deans, the shifting alliances, the attentiveness to "infinitesimal shifts of status and position." Prose's forte is in limning the details of such small worlds, as with tabloid publishing in her 1986 novel Bigfoot Dreams or New Age feminism in 1995's Hunters and Gatherers.

This is the procedure of a novelist of manners, and Prose's recent essays in Har per's and the Wall Street Journal on literary and artistic subjects reveal her to be an acute observer of the American scene. But unlike British exponents of the genre, who cultivate a small turf in which characters and details are homegrown, so to speak, she is reporting in Blue Angel on behavior that is no longer local, no longer even American, but indicative of how, increasingly, we live worldwide. Even as products and goods circulate more freely around the globe, even as we all have more "choice," the manners of those in the Option Age have become more uniform. Prose's novel could just as well be set in, say, South Africa. Indeed, another novel touching on the subject of sexual harass ment in academia, Dis grace, by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, has recently appeared.