Blue Angel
Francine Prose
Harper Collins
2000
Ms. Hen bought this book at a used bookstore shortly after
she read another novel by Francine Prose, HOUSEHOLD SAINTS, which she adored.
That was one of Ms. Hen’s top ten last year, and she read it right before
Christmas. Ms. Prose has a way of creating believable, fantastic novels, which
Ms. Hen admires.
This is a world that is familiar to Ms. Hen. The protagonist
is a creative writing professor at a small, expensive, middle tier college in
Vermont. Ms. Hen has been in a lot of creative writing classes, and these are scenarios
that she knows quite well. The person whose story is being workshopped has to
keep quiet while their darling is butchered. And it is always pulverized, no
matter how good it is. A lot of sensitive people can’t handle it. The young
people in this novel are typical creative writing students, though they might
not be advanced.
Ted Swenson has been teaching at Euston for almost twenty
years. He has never had an affair with a student, but that changes when he
meets Angela Argo. He describes her as ferret-like, but she is a talented
writer. He becomes obsessed with her writing, even though he is happily married
to the college nurse. The college introduces a new no sexual harassment
campaign; Ted finds it annoying that he is forced to go to a seminar while he
has never done anything wrong. At least not yet.
Ms. Hen thought this novel could be considered LOLITA in
reverse. Ted isn’t the one that wants to behave badly, and Angela is no wilting
flower. She uses him to get what she wants. Ms. Hen read that this novel is
supposed to be satire, and it seems ridiculous to her at times.
Ms. Hen thinks the author did an excellent job of writing
from the point of view of the opposite gender. Ms. Hen has never attempted
this, she is not sure why, but she thinks she does not understand the male
brain enough to get inside and to think what they think. Ms. Hen imagines that
Ms. Prose is able to do this because she is writing about a character that she
knows, the creative writing professor, which is not difficult for another
professor to write.
There are lots of significant chickens in this novel. On the
first page, in the initial creative writing workshop, a story is being
discussed in which a chicken is raped, and Swenson thinks about this, “so
blindly focused on the imminent challenge of leading a class discussion of a
student story, in which a teenager, after a bad date with his girlfriend, rapes
an uncooked chicken by the light of the family fridge.” Ms. Hen thinks this is
a great way to begin a novel. It catches the reader’s attention, it’s weird and
freaky, and there is a chicken involved. Ms. Hen does not condone these
actions, but she understands why the author chose to do this, to shock and
disgust, and goad the reader into continuing.
Angela, the student that becomes Swenson’s downfall, is
writing a novel entitled EGGS, which Swenson thinks is the best student writing
he has ever read. It’s about a teenage girl who is doing a science project
trying to breed chickens in her backyard, who has a crush on her music teacher, “What to do with the broken egg? My dad
transferred it, oozing gunk to his other hand, and picked up an egg from
another incubator. It broke. It smelled bad, too.” Ms. Hen likes that the
novel is called EGGS, and the character is attempting to hatch chickens.
Ms. Hen thoroughly enjoyed this novel. It felt familiar to
her, but foreign at the same time. She felt sorry for Ted, but not honestly
sorry. He had bad luck, but it could happen to anyone. This is a good example
of a story within a novel, or several stories within a novel, which Ms. Hen
admires. There are many things to appreciate in this novel, and it continues to
twist and turn and surprise.
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