The politically correct blues

>> Blue Angel is Lolita gone to college

by JULIET WATERS

A creative writing professor once told me that a good writer tells you exactly how a story is meant to be read in the opening paragraph. I thought of him when I read the first paragraph of Francine Prose's viciously funny satire of '90s academia, Blue Angel.

"Ted 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... 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?'"

It's not his imagination. This week there's a story about a teenager who, frustrated after a bad date with his girlfriend, rapes an uncooked chicken by the light of the family fridge. A couple of weeks before there was a story in which a hero's friend describes peeping through a neighbour's window and watching her felate a German Shepherd. And before that a story about a Vermont farm wife whose husband keeps calling out his cow's name in his sleep. Three bestiality stories and term has only just begun.

I'm still not sure what this first paragraph tells us about how Prose wants us to read Blue Angel--perhaps as a perverse fable about the death of innocence? But if we were to define a good writer as someone who makes it virtually impossible to put down a book after the first few lines then Prose would be among the best.

From the atmosphere of the creative writing seminar--the discomfort, desperation and general weirdness of an academic exercise that can be as intimate and crass as group sex--we are then led into the bland, condescending world of academic political correctness. The staff of Euston College are brought together to review the new policy on sexual harassment, which prohibits professors from sex with current or former students.

There's no doubt where the plot is going when Swenson becomes involved with Angela Argo, a student writer as fucked up as she is talented. A pathological liar, Angela is half Kathy Acker, half Alice Munro, with the demeanour of a baby chick in leather and a dog collar. Angela seduces Swenson with her novel Eggs, a delicately written Gothic tale about a young girl's developing crush on a high school biology teacher, then sets him up for easy execution at the hands of his jealous, bitter colleagues.

The innocent male professor ruined by the sanctimonious policing of campus sexuality has been successfully done before, on Broadway by David Mamet and earning a Booker prize for J.M. Coetzee. That Prose is a woman writer defending a male character in this situation is a new twist, but that's not what makes Blue Angel so compelling. It's that Prose so instinctively brings out the mob in us. There are few things more hypnotic that the slow, surgical dismemberment of a successful life.

With his tenure and pathetically light course load (this class of nine students is his only one), his beautiful Sicilian wife (the head nurse on campus), a critically acclaimed novel under his belt (the success of which he's been riding on for 10 years) it's hard not to sort of hate Swenson. Oh sure he has problems, a terrible childhood, estrangement from a sullen college-age daughter and writer's block brought on by too easy a life. But only the purest soul won't take some pleasure in seeing this guy fry like an egg after reading Angela's story.

Yet suddenly we are brought up short by an act of heroism so obvious and yet so unexpected that one can't help feeling somewhat ashamed of one's voyeurism. We are as helplessly seduced by Prose's novel as Swenson is by Angela's. But luckily we don't have to pay the price. :

Blue Angel by Francine Prose, Harper Collins, hc, 314pp, $34.99