A Teacher's Pet With Fangs

By Michele Orecklin

A middle-aged and marginally successful author, Ted Swenson can summon up only limp enthusiasm for the creative-writing course he teaches at a second-rate college in remote Vermont. Suffering through classes with unimaginative students and dinners with pedantic colleagues, the disgruntled professor of Francine Prose's abrasively comic new novel, Blue Angel (Harper Collins; 314 pages; $25), can't wait to rush home so he can avoid writing his overdue third novel. In addition to battling ennui, Swenson must also contend with a forbidding campus environment fraught with race and gender minefields.

Rather expectedly, he becomes attracted to a student, though his obsession arrives not in the dewy-eyed, nubile form but in the unlikely person of Angela Argo, a fierce, skinny and multipierced "punk Chihuahua" who offers up a novel, chapter by chapter, for Swenson's critique. Flummoxed by her talent and flattered by her praise, Swenson finds himself drawn to Angela in increasingly unprofessorial ways despite his seemingly sturdy marriage. Though he suspects she may be unstable--and a pathological liar to boot--Angela's pull leads Swenson to a bungled sexual encounter and what proves to be an ill-advised promise to show her work to his editor.

One senses Swenson's fate almost from his first meeting with Angela; not only does Prose repeatedly refer to the 1930 film Blue Angel, which features the debasement of an infatuated professor, but she has also constructed her collegiate climate as a latter-day Salem, tyrannized by the puritanical forces of sexual-harassment policies that demand some sacrifice. However, by presenting neither character as an obvious victim or villain, the novel maintains a level of suspense, momentum and humor. And though the hypocrisy of the political-correctness movement has been amply explored elsewhere, Prose still manages to find fresh ways to lampoon it.

--By Michele Orecklin