“Screamingly funny … Blue Angel culminates in a sexual harassment hearing that rivals the Salem witch trials.” —USA Today
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.
“Screamingly funny … Blue Angel culminates in a sexual harassment hearing that rivals the Salem witch trials.” —USA Today
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.
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Overview
“Screamingly funny … Blue Angel culminates in a sexual harassment hearing that rivals the Salem witch trials.” —USA Today
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780060882037 |
---|---|
Publisher: | HarperCollins |
Publication date: | 02/28/2006 |
Series: | P.S. Series |
Pages: | 344 |
Sales rank: | 505,128 |
Product dimensions: | 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.77(d) |
About the Author
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Hometown:
New York, New YorkDate of Birth:
April 1, 1947Place of Birth:
Brooklyn, New YorkEducation:
B.A., Radcliffe College, 1968Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Swenson waits for his students to complete their private rituals, adjusting zippers and caps, arranging the pens and notebooks so painstakingly chosen to express their tender young selves, the fidgety ballets that signal their weekly submission and reaffirm the social compact to be stuck in this room for an hour without real food or TV. He glances around the seminar table, counts nine; good, everyone's here, then riffles through the manuscript they're scheduled to discuss, pauses, and says, "Is it my imagination, or have we been seeing an awful lot of stories about humans having sex with animals?"
The students stare at him, appalled. He can't believe he said that. His pathetic stab at humor sounded precisely like what it was: a question he'd dreamed up and rehearsed as he walked across North Quad, past the gothic graystone cloisters, the Founders Chapel, the lovely two-hundred-year-old maples just starting to drop the orange leaves that lie so thickly on the cover of the Euston College viewbook. He'd hardly noticed his surroundings, so blindly focused was he on the imminent challenge of leading a class discussion of a student story in which a teenager, drunk and frustrated after a bad date with his girlfriend, rapes an uncooked chicken by the light of the family fridge.
How is Swenson supposed to begin? What he really wants to ask is: Was this story written expressly to torment me? What little sadist thought it would be fun to watch me tackle the technical flaws of a story that spends two pages describing how the boy cracks the chicken's rib cage to better fit the slippery visceral cavity around his throbbing hard-on? But Danny Liebman,whose story it is, isn't out to torture Swenson. He'd just wanted something interesting for his hero to do.
Slouched over, or sliding under, the seminar table, the students gaze at Swenson, their eyes as opaque and lidded as the eyes of the chicken whose plucked head the hero turns to face him during their late-night kitchen romance. But chickens in suburban refrigerators are generally headless. Swenson makes a mental note to mention this detail later.
"I don't get it," says Carlos Ostapcek. "What other stories about animals?" Carlos always starts off. Ex-navy, ex-reform school, he's the alpha male, the only student who's ever been anywhere except inside a classroom. As it happens, he's the only male student, not counting Danny.
What stories is Swenson talking about? He suddenly can't recall. Maybe it was some other year, another class completely. He's been having too many moments like this: a door slams shut behind him and his mind disappears. is this early Alzheimer's? He's only fortyseven. Only forty-seven? What happened in the heartbeat since he was his students' age?
Maybe his problem's the muggy heat, bizarre for late September, El Niño dumping a freak monsoon all over northern Vermont. His classroom-high in the college bell tower-is the hottest spot on campus. And this past summer, workmen painted the windows shut. Swenson has complained to Buildings and Grounds, but they're too busy fixing sidewalk holes that could result in lawsuits.
"Is something wrong, Professor Swenson?" Claris Williams inclines her handsome head, done this week in bright rows of coiled dyed-orange snails. Everyone, including Swenson, is a little in love with, and scared of, Claris, possibly because she combines such intelligent sweetness with the glacial beauty of an African princess turned supermodel.
"Why do you ask?" says Swenson.
"You groaned," Claris says. "Twice."
"Nothing's wrong." Swenson's groaning in front of his class. Doesn't that prove nothing's wrong? "And if you call me Professor again, I'll fail you for the semester."
Claris stiffens. Relax! It's only a joke! Euston students call teachers by their first names, that's what Euston parents pay twenty-eight thousand a year for. But some kids can't make themselves say Ted, the scholarship students like Carlos (who does an end run around it by calling him Coach), the Vermont farm kids like Jonelle, the black students like Claris and Makeesha, the ones least likely to be charmed by his jokey threats. Euston hardly has any students like that, but this fan, for some reason, they're all in Swenson's class.
Last week they discussed Claris's story about a girl who accompanies her mother on a job cleaning a rich woman's house, an eerily convincing piece that moved from hilarity to horror as it chronicled the havoc wreaked by the maid stumbling through the rooms, chugging Thunderbird wine, until the horrified child watches her tumble downstairs.
The students were speechless with embarrassment. They all assumed, as did Swenson, that Claris's story was maybe not literal truth, but painfully close to the facts. At last, Makeesha Davis, the only other black student, said she was sick of stories in which sisters were always messed up on dope or drunk or selling their booty or dead.
Swenson argued for Claris. He'd dragged in Chekhov to tell the class that the writer need not paint a picture of an ideal world, but only describe the actual world, without sermons, without judgment. As if his students give a shit about some dead Russian that Swenson ritually exhumes to support his loser opinions. And yet just mentioning Chekhov made Swenson feel less alone, as if he were being watched over by a saint who wouldn't judge him for the criminal fraud of pretending that these kids could be taught what Swenson's pretending to teach them. Chekhov would see into his heart and know that he sincerely wished he could give his students what they want: talent, fame, money, a job.
After the workshop on her story, Claris stayed to talk. Swenson had groped for some tactful way to tell her that he knew what it...
Blue Angel. Copyright © by Francine Prose. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.What People are Saying About This
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.
Reading Group Guide
National Book Award Finalist
An IntroductionMeet Ted Swenson (the narrator calls him only Swenson), a middle-aged, less than prolific novelist cum creative writing teacher on staff at Euston, a mediocre private college nestled deep in the "moose-ridden" wilderness of rural Vermont. There, he has carved out a semi-satisfying life with his wife Sherrie, the campus nurse with whom he fell in love years earlier in a New York City emergency room. Their marriage is a happy one. The sight of Sherrie in her blue jeans, black t-shirt, and lab coat still awakens Swenson's desire, and together they enjoy the simple pleasures of domesticity: comfortable sex, Sherrie's lovingly prepared dinners, fine wine and the view of her vegetable garden from the kitchen window. Upon closer observation, Ted and Sherrie's familial tranquility is precarious. Ruby, their melancholy daughter, fled to a state school after a fall-out with her father over a teenage romance with a campus bad-boy. The specter of a failed writing career torments Swenson, as do his under-read, culturally stagnate students. Add to the mix a volatile politically correct campus climate -- what was once provocative intellectual and emotional inquiry is now sexual harassment to litigious students and parents. Indeed, life is closing in on Swenson, and his resentment is palpable. Into this pressure-cooker walks 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." When she enters -- or, rather, storms -- into Swenson's life of repressed longings, all hell breaks loose. And who better to skewer the resulting circusand its performers than Francine Prose? While Blue Angel is an irreverent, smart, and deliciously funny satire of political correctness and the ivory tower, it is also searing and uncompromising in its exploration of Swenson's spiral into a mid-life crisis. Francine Prose detonates some well-rooted cultural beliefs surrounding both of these topics. For instance, Angela, a barely legal student, literally preys upon the unsuspecting Swenson. Readers may squirm uncomfortably while contemplating the notion that the sexy middle-aged male teacher is the victim, and the female student the aggressor. Flawed as Swenson may be, he's a complex character, and he makes us think. We cringe at each wrong turn he makes, as he fumbles around wounding those who love him. Yet, we empathize with Ted Swenson. He's so . . . human. And that seems to be the point. Human behavior is not black and white, and cannot be stifled by the tenets of puritanical political correctness. Moral people sometimes do immoral things, and they learn important lessons from their foibles. Life is complicated, unpredictable, and often uncomfortable. There's just no controlling it. One can only hold on to a sense of humor and, hopefully, emerge relatively unscathed and, perhaps, enriched. Discussion Questions
About the Author: Francine Prose is the author of ten highly acclaimed works of fiction, including Bigfoot Dreams, Household Saints, Hunters and Gatherers, Primitive People, and Guided Tours of Hell. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and The Paris Review; she is a contributing editor at Harper's, and she writes regularly on art for the Wall Street Journal. The recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, Francine Prose is a Director's Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Johns Hopkins University. She lives in New York City.
Interviews
Stating the Obvious: An Interview with Francine Prose
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 andnot to sound too new-agey herethe 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 lifein 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 withoutthat 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 Swensonevery 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 goesSwenson's love and nemesisanybody who teaches would know that a student like that is big trouble. And the fact that Swenson is drawn to herit'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 studentsI 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 obviousand 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.