My Review of Francine Prose’s Novel
Blue Angel first appeared as a 1930 German black and white film about a professor, who falls for a cabaret performer — Lola Lola. Enamored by Lola, the professor loses everything: his job, his wife, his self respect, eventually his life. The film satires the hypocrisy of the then contemporary middle class and resonated with the widespread feeling of middle class decline. To illustrate that some things never change, Blue Angel by Francine Prose takes its title from that film, the same way Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom takes its title from that chapter in the David story. Blue Angel the novel demonstrates the hypocrisy of the politically correct and the politics of academic life at the turn of the millennium, through the perspective of an enamored professor, his subsequent downfall, death and rebirth.
In between the 1930 film and the 2000 novel, Vladimir Nabokov published Lolita, a novel of a European professor, Humbert Humbert, and a twelve year-old American girl, Dolores Haze, whom he nicknames Lolita. Blue Angel can’t help but bring this lyrical novel with all its name playing to mind. Blue Angel’s Lola Lola is played by Angela Argo and in fact, all the Professor’s love interests have alliterative names, Sherrie Swenson (wife) and Magda Moyanhan (flirt). Taking the title one step further, Blue Angel is the title of the professor’s first novel — a tale of a battered woman rescued by a doctor. The professor saw the movie while dating his wife and later, he sees Angela heading into the video store (remember those?) returning the same movie. The professor-student is an oft-used, long-standing trope, the film was based on Heinrich Mann novel Professor Unrat published in 1905.
Unlike Lolita, which creates an unlikeable narrator / anti-hero in first four paragraphs, Blue Angel starts with a September day-in-the-life of the novel’s protagonist, Ted Swenson, just as Swenson begins his sophomore creative writing course with an off-beat beastiality joke. Swenson finds teaching creative writing to the underachieving children of the affluent to be an almost unbearable task. After all, he still considers himself a writer of the highest literary rank. At forty-seven, Swenson hasn’t published a novel in years, but he lives in tenured comfort at this fictional liberal arts college, Euston College, in northern Vermont. Meanwhile, his teenage daughter, Ruby, has started her second year at UVM (“State”) less than an hour away in the relative metropolis of Burlington. To his consternation, she’s stayed away from home since going off to college; and like a concerned parent Swenson asks himself — where did we fail ourselves? Like a good husband, Swenson professes his love for his wife, Sherrie, who saved his life in the West Village over twenty years ago. Despite the ersatz intimacy of his seminars, Swenson maintains a professional distance from all his students, never receiving or returning the slightest glance from his female students.
However, this year’s class does have a writer of promising talent and a Lolita of cunning skill. Angela, a pierced and tattooed girl with dyed hair and engineer boots, too eagerly shares the insecurities of her fragile personality. She’ll engineer T-R-O-U-B-L-E. She wants to Swenson’s help with writing her novel, a tale of a music student seduced by her band teacher over seductive clarinet lessons and failed attempts at incubating chicken eggs. As the semester progresses, Angela’s novel, Eggs, becomes more seductive as it becomes more eerily biographical of Swenson’s life, echoing Hamlet’s play-with-in-the-play. Taking the reader along for the reckless ride, Swenson flies by all the red flags that he’s fallen for Angela. The final flag — after he’s already committed to driving Angela to Burlington to buy a new computer so she can finish Eggs, she gets in his car wearing a black miniskirt in November in northern Vermont.
In Lolita, the consummation of Humbert’s pedophiliac obsession punctuates the middle of the novel; in Blue Angel Swenson’s consciousness tells him:
He could be one of the unfortunate girls who manage to get pregnant while convincing themselves they are not really having sex.
Punctuating the middle of this novel, this sentence embodies the whole. Blue Angel has an ambiguity that enthralls and confounds. Whose playing who? Who really did what?
In another episode, Swenson makes the same drive to Burlington to buy a computer with his daughter, Ruby, who has finally come home for Thanksgiving weekend. Swenson has overslept, feels sick, he swerves and drives erratically, Ruby asks him if he wants her to drive. On the next page, Ruby changes subjects:
It’s not about responsibility, Ruby says, it’s about not having secrets. Everyone knows that secrets can kill — …. Dad, Ruby says, tremulously. Don’t you think you should open your eyes?
Only that unfortunate girl would take Ruby’s question literally, but Ruby may not be hinting at Swenson’s obsession with Angela either.
Checkov’s Gun
After his computer trip with Angela and his technical malfunction, Swenson agrees to fly to New York on Black Friday to have lunch with his publisher to recommend Eggs, for Angela. At lunch, Swenson advocates on Angela’s behalf, but is easily rebuffed, and he accidentally leaves the Eggs manuscript in the restaurant. That gun will go off at the end to eat him.
But there’s another line that will eventually fire. After Swenson’s fall and confession to Sherrie, Sherrie sees a woman’s rights rally on campus and decides she’s had enough as she tells Swenson:
But I’ve been on your side for so long, I’ve had so much practice being on your side. I couldn’t figure out which side I was on or how to be on anyone else’s.
Wine or no wine , Swenson hears Sherrie say that. He’s still reeling, he hasn’t quite caught his breath, when Sherrie tells him she’s had it, she’s leaving.
The subplot is expertly written, there’s just enough there to make it go off right after you’ve stepped away from the novel’s dynamic conclusion.
Group Discussion
Group settings allow Prose to quickly give a broader view of the Euston community. Swenson’s creative writing class allows Prose, through a few representative characters, to give a laugh-out-loud parody of undergraduate life. The next group setting, a faculty meeting on Euston’s new sexual harassment policy, establishes foreboding and foreshadowing as the university Dean takes the podium in chapel under the watchful eyes of a portrait of Jonathan Edwards — the nineteenth century hellfire minister. At another time, Swenson meets his English Department colleagues at a more intimate dinner at the same Dean’s house, where Prose delivers merciless satire on the English department set and Swenson makes a fool of himself. At the final group gathering of faculty and students, all of Swenson’s clownishly lecherous behavior appears so unambiguously in plain sight that even blind Swenson sees no explanation that can hide his secrets.
The Final Take
But yet, after that final gathering, one could read that the old Swenson has died and a new one reborn — that unfortunate girl would read it that way. My take is that by the end he’s as loathsome as Humbert Humbert is at the beginning. Why don’t find a copy today and take a read.
