I like Blue Angel.
Francine Prose is my unacknowledged muse. Born exactly a year after me, on April 1, 1947. Siri, my day younger twin, Francine (unknown to me, and Siri is not speaking) and I overlapped for a year in Cambridge, Mass. Much smarter, she graduated a year ahead of me. And then we everlapped in San Francisco , the same world, no intersection.
A very personal lesson I took from Blue Angel is that whenever a student is in my office, both of its doors stay wide open.
Here is a good May 2010 review by late D. G. Myers:
"Few serious critics today would single out Francine Prose as the leading American novelist—if only because there are few serious critics today, and even fewer who read novels for enjoyment and news about the human mystery. [...] her novel belongs to the same tradition as William Golding’s, a tradition that originates with Gulliver’s Travels and passes through Heart of Darkness. [...] Provoked by the case of her friend Stephen Dobyns, a poet and novelist who was suspended from his job at Syracuse University after remarking upon a graduate student’s breasts, Prose creates a hero who is guilty of something worse (sleeping with an undergraduate)."
Goes on. It's really good.
Here is May 2000 Francine Prose explaining how the book was written, as she slowly realizes that Charlie Rose had not read the book. Given the chance to apologize, Swenson finds that he cannot. Blue Angel:
"he is not particularly sorry for having broken the rules of Euston College [...] He is extremely sorry for having spent twenty years of his one and only life, twenty years he will never get back, among people he can’t talk to, men and women to whom he can’t even tell the simple truth."
Here are a few snippets from other people that I mashed into a short summary:
"Blue Angel is about the complex relationship between a 47 years old hapless English professor Swenson and his student Angela, a pouty, punk-rock aspiring writer, a trouble with multiple piercings and tattoos, and Swenson is vulnerable to it. Her writing is way better than what he’s been reading. In fact, it’s better than what he’s been writing. We spend the whole novel inside Swenson’s head. A lifetime in creative writing classrooms has left him defenseless against literary art. The joke is that the brilliant student is also a terrible writer-- the excerpts we read of her novel are cliches of goth/riot grrrl anomie, with the lurking menace and squalor and minimalism and repulsive/erotic imagery. No sooner has she gotten him in bed than the trouble begins.The rest of the novel, like a slowly ripping Band-Aid, chronicles the incrementally torturous demise of a good man’s life. The chick turns on him, his wife leaves, he takes to the bottle and loses his job, the chick gets a book deal, his editor tells him to give up fiction and write a memoir about substance abuse. The novel is about the truth - how hazy it becomes, how we become ensnared in the lies we tell ourselves and in the stories others tell us. How eventually, the truth can become so tangled there is no clear path out."
There is a movie adaptation, Submission. Francine Prose says: "It's no longer for possible for a woman to say `Something happened' and be told `No, nothing happened'. I have not seen the movie - it's on Amazon.
The title comes from a 1930 classic Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) (see it here) by Josef von Sternberg, the beginning of Marlene Dietrich’s rise to superstardom. Immanuel Rath, a gymnasium professor follows his students to the local cabaret, The Blue Angel. He becomes obsessed with headliner Lola Lola, played by Dietrich. This leads to his ruin and humiliation.
