douglasbanhado

This novel was a New York Times Notable Book, and a finalist for the National Book Award. These accolades prove the reverse of what you'd imagine: not that Blue Angel is a good read, or anything or literary merit, but that standards on the whole have fallen. This novel fails on so many levels, I felt insulted 150pgs in and angry by the end.The novel wants to be either a satirical critique of political correctness, and how its guilty-without-trial ethos of college-level sexual harassment is as easy to manipulate as the justice system in the south was in To Kill a Mockingbird. Except: Lee's tale was extraordinarily well-drawn (Atticus! What a character!), well-edited, and well-executed. Prose's version, however, is painfully predictable, its characters by and large either annoying as shit or completely unbelievable, and its writing very very weak. It would be tedious to get into why, on a technical level, the novel is a failure. So let's keep to the thematic issues. Basically a reverse-Lolita, it's the story of Swenson, a neurotic wimp of a novelist professor at a remote liberal arts school, who, despite what looks like a pretty amazing life—loving spouse, cush job, security—gets pissed off or bored by pretty much everything. Until a "punk" student, Angela Argo, turns in astonishingly good work and wakes him from a slumber that's never very convincing. He encourages her work, a novel in progress about a high school student's burgeoning affair with her music teacher. They inevitably fool around, and we do believe that the encounter is mostly her seducing him: he's really too incompetent to do any of the work, and besides, he points out to the reader several times his clean record up to this point, after 20 years of teaching. You can pretty much guess the rest: she urges him to show her work to his editor, he tries and fails, so she tells everyone and his life is in ruins. A few hundred pages of really elementary buildup for ten pages of climax wherein the reader is supposed to go, "But wait! It's not like that! Swenson's not entirely to blame! She's complicit!" And, to be honest, I did a little. Then I realized how contrived everything is. He's "tried" by a jury of his colleagues, apparently whose fierce devotion to semi-antiquated 101 feminist values more befitting a freshman than any scholar on the topic (one of whom happens to be in the committee trying Swenson) trumps any sense they would realistically have of fairness, democracy, justice, or even humanity. A proper allegory might be: imagine your boss of several years was told by one of your employees, perhaps the mailroom clerk, that you were embezzling money. Now, despite the fact that you've been an employee for years without incident, and that your boss happens to be very current as to how you are in no position to embezzle anything, he fires you on the spot. Not very realistic is it? Perhaps I'm being reductive, which is fair considering it is a novel. You can never parse 300pgs of moral ambiguities to a paragraph or two. It was an admirable attempt by Prose, and a decent avenue to explore issues of hypocrisy in our current colleges, but when ambition so far overreaches talent, you have to refer to other successes. So I will. For a much more believable neurotic wimp, check out Jonathan Ames' Wake Up Sir ; for a better book on a college professor's infatuation with students and writing, see Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys (also the excellent film adaptation by Curtis Hanson); and for a better satire on academia and sexual politics, I can think of no better place than the original source: Lolita (Pnin is also great, though less about sex.) And I have yet to read it, but all my friends love Zadie Smith's On Beauty, which tackles similar issues to Prose's book.

2022-12-18 03:22