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Mark Stevens's Reviews > Blue Angel
Blue Angel
by
by
From the opening scene in Blue Angel, Ted Swenson is squirming from a self-imposed bit of foolishness.
“The students stare at him, appalled. He can't believe he said that. His pathetic stab at humor sounded precisely like what it was: a question he dreamed up and rehearsed as he walked across North Quad, past the gothic graystone cloisters, the Founders Chapel, the lovely two-hundred-year-old maples just starting to drop the orange leaves that lie so thickly on the cover of the Euston College viewbook.�
The question he posed to his class of writing students is whether there has been a recent spate of stories being produced about humans having sex with animals.
But soon Swenson is challenged by a student—what other stories? And Swenson “suddenly can’t recall. Maybe it was some other years, another class completely. He’s been having too many moments like this: a door slams shut behind him and his mind disappears. Is this early Alzheimer’s? He’s only forty-seven. Only forty-seven. What happened in the heartbeat since he was his students� age?�
We’re in Vermont at a hip school where students are expected to call their professors by their first names. “But some kids can’t make themselves say Ted, the scholarship students like Carlos (who does an end run around it by calling him Coach), the Vermont farm kids like Jonelle, the black students like Carlis and Makeesha, the ones least likely to be charmed by his jokey threats. Euston hardly has any students like that, but this fall, for some reason, they’re all in Swenson’s class.�
One student hasn’t said anything, five weeks into the school year. Until, finally, Angela Argo utters, “I think it sucks� about one student’s story. Angela, thinks Swenson, is a “special pain in the ass.� Angela has facial piercings and a ring on every finger. But the “special pain in the ass,� it turns out, also holds a certain allure. She can write! And Ted Swenson, who coasting on one novel published years ago and who is making barely perceptible progress on a new one, is taken. Angela is soon “occupying more than her share of territory in his mind.�
Soon, Angela is sharing a draft of her first novel with Swenson and soon there are meetings in his office, and then a trip to the big city of Burlington to help Angela buy a computer, and before you know it, Swenson is keeping secrets from his wife, and we all kind of have a hunch where this is going, don’t we?
The squirming Ted Swenson, who feels uncomfortable in nearly every scene in Blue Angel, is soon going to squirm even more. The question is whether he can find an escape, some relief—whether the gothic graystone institution will offer him mercy.
This sentence includes a mild spoiler, but let’s just say that when you combine ‘gothic,� ‘graystone� and ‘cloisters� in your description of an institution, it’s unlikely that the current college powers that be will relax their standards for behavior between faculty and students, even as they sharpen the guillotine.
Blue Angel puts Ted Swenson in a torture chamber—self-inflicted torture as he parses every decision leading up to the awkward few minutes in Angela Argo’s dorm room and as he must attempt to discern the differences and distinctions between the reality of his actions versus the fictional accounts in Angela’s work-in-progress.
To make matters more interesting—and therefore more torturous—a dark cloud hovers around the Ted-Angela connection because it could have been transactional—did Ted Swenson agree to bring Angela’s novel to his agent in New York in exchange for some favors? Unfortunately for Swenson, appearances are everything.
This is only the surface of a novel with a raft of colorful characters—fellow faculty who admire Swenson, fellow faculty who despise him, college leadership, Swenson’s wife, Swenson’s college-age daughter Ruby, and all of Swenson’s wannabe writer students. Some of the scenes with the students are very, very funny. Prose’s dialogue is terrific.
The title of Francine Prose’s novel is a direct reference to the Marlene Diedrich movie (1930) of the same name, in which a professor falls for a nightclub singer. The movie is amply referenced in the pages here. The interwoven fabric of Swenson’s family history, and how much he used to inform his one novel to date, and Angela Argo’s fiction, which may or may not be based on her version of her upbringing, is tightly wound, especially after Swenson publicly adopts the title of Angela’s work in progress as one of his own. Readers, just remember that the writer with the best story wins.
In an article for The Paris Review, spurred by the film adaptation of the novel (“Submission,� starring Stanley Tucci), Francine Prose underscored what made the novel so interesting, whether we feel pity for Swenson as we see his desire run headlong into outright manipulation.
Warning, mild spoilers in Prose’s comments:
“Part of what still engages me about this story, and what makes it now seem riskier than ever, is that the female character—younger, more vulnerable—is the one who has the agency. She is the one who turns out to be in control, and who determines the way things proceed. This version of the familiar professor-student narrative is so rarely mentioned that it is likely to provoke a hostile reaction. But are we saying that these situations never exist? That woman are always the hapless innocents? Yes, Harvey Weinstein’s behavior was reprehensible. Yes, female students have been raped, pawed, bullied, and blackmailed into sex by their professors and mentors. But does that mean that we have a moral obligation to only create and consume art that follows those scripts?�
No, Francine, we do not.
Final note: The movie version is scene-by-scene faithful to the book, but it falls oddly flat. No movie could capture the deep interior space that Prose creates for the hapless Ted Swenson.
“The students stare at him, appalled. He can't believe he said that. His pathetic stab at humor sounded precisely like what it was: a question he dreamed up and rehearsed as he walked across North Quad, past the gothic graystone cloisters, the Founders Chapel, the lovely two-hundred-year-old maples just starting to drop the orange leaves that lie so thickly on the cover of the Euston College viewbook.�
The question he posed to his class of writing students is whether there has been a recent spate of stories being produced about humans having sex with animals.
But soon Swenson is challenged by a student—what other stories? And Swenson “suddenly can’t recall. Maybe it was some other years, another class completely. He’s been having too many moments like this: a door slams shut behind him and his mind disappears. Is this early Alzheimer’s? He’s only forty-seven. Only forty-seven. What happened in the heartbeat since he was his students� age?�
We’re in Vermont at a hip school where students are expected to call their professors by their first names. “But some kids can’t make themselves say Ted, the scholarship students like Carlos (who does an end run around it by calling him Coach), the Vermont farm kids like Jonelle, the black students like Carlis and Makeesha, the ones least likely to be charmed by his jokey threats. Euston hardly has any students like that, but this fall, for some reason, they’re all in Swenson’s class.�
One student hasn’t said anything, five weeks into the school year. Until, finally, Angela Argo utters, “I think it sucks� about one student’s story. Angela, thinks Swenson, is a “special pain in the ass.� Angela has facial piercings and a ring on every finger. But the “special pain in the ass,� it turns out, also holds a certain allure. She can write! And Ted Swenson, who coasting on one novel published years ago and who is making barely perceptible progress on a new one, is taken. Angela is soon “occupying more than her share of territory in his mind.�
Soon, Angela is sharing a draft of her first novel with Swenson and soon there are meetings in his office, and then a trip to the big city of Burlington to help Angela buy a computer, and before you know it, Swenson is keeping secrets from his wife, and we all kind of have a hunch where this is going, don’t we?
The squirming Ted Swenson, who feels uncomfortable in nearly every scene in Blue Angel, is soon going to squirm even more. The question is whether he can find an escape, some relief—whether the gothic graystone institution will offer him mercy.
This sentence includes a mild spoiler, but let’s just say that when you combine ‘gothic,� ‘graystone� and ‘cloisters� in your description of an institution, it’s unlikely that the current college powers that be will relax their standards for behavior between faculty and students, even as they sharpen the guillotine.
Blue Angel puts Ted Swenson in a torture chamber—self-inflicted torture as he parses every decision leading up to the awkward few minutes in Angela Argo’s dorm room and as he must attempt to discern the differences and distinctions between the reality of his actions versus the fictional accounts in Angela’s work-in-progress.
To make matters more interesting—and therefore more torturous—a dark cloud hovers around the Ted-Angela connection because it could have been transactional—did Ted Swenson agree to bring Angela’s novel to his agent in New York in exchange for some favors? Unfortunately for Swenson, appearances are everything.
This is only the surface of a novel with a raft of colorful characters—fellow faculty who admire Swenson, fellow faculty who despise him, college leadership, Swenson’s wife, Swenson’s college-age daughter Ruby, and all of Swenson’s wannabe writer students. Some of the scenes with the students are very, very funny. Prose’s dialogue is terrific.
The title of Francine Prose’s novel is a direct reference to the Marlene Diedrich movie (1930) of the same name, in which a professor falls for a nightclub singer. The movie is amply referenced in the pages here. The interwoven fabric of Swenson’s family history, and how much he used to inform his one novel to date, and Angela Argo’s fiction, which may or may not be based on her version of her upbringing, is tightly wound, especially after Swenson publicly adopts the title of Angela’s work in progress as one of his own. Readers, just remember that the writer with the best story wins.
In an article for The Paris Review, spurred by the film adaptation of the novel (“Submission,� starring Stanley Tucci), Francine Prose underscored what made the novel so interesting, whether we feel pity for Swenson as we see his desire run headlong into outright manipulation.
Warning, mild spoilers in Prose’s comments:
“Part of what still engages me about this story, and what makes it now seem riskier than ever, is that the female character—younger, more vulnerable—is the one who has the agency. She is the one who turns out to be in control, and who determines the way things proceed. This version of the familiar professor-student narrative is so rarely mentioned that it is likely to provoke a hostile reaction. But are we saying that these situations never exist? That woman are always the hapless innocents? Yes, Harvey Weinstein’s behavior was reprehensible. Yes, female students have been raped, pawed, bullied, and blackmailed into sex by their professors and mentors. But does that mean that we have a moral obligation to only create and consume art that follows those scripts?�
No, Francine, we do not.
Final note: The movie version is scene-by-scene faithful to the book, but it falls oddly flat. No movie could capture the deep interior space that Prose creates for the hapless Ted Swenson.
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
July 1, 2021
–
Finished Reading
July 12, 2021
– Shelved
