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Blue Angel is not an original story: a male figure of authority violates the societal trust that has been placed in his hands and enters into a sexual relationship with a young female subordinate. However, Francine Prose elevates the story by making it about human desire. When we see something that we very much want, desire can guide our actions without any consideration about the future. Whether it’s an extra serving of desert, an expensive piece of jewelry, or an illusion of youth, rational thought can be completely absent, or bent into an accomplice, during our acts of indulgence.

Francine Prose accomplishes her story by doing something that I relish in novels. She constantly probes the human mind of her main character so that by the end, you know who he is. She creates a character with the ability to decisively act in contradiction to his rational thoughts, or to act in the absence of rational thought altogether. In truth, Blue Angle reveals the person of Ted Swenson.

The supporting characters, if not as well defined, are just as craftily written. They exist with the definition of the main character’s limited understanding of them. After all, if we were there, the most we could hope to understand of these people is what we could see from a distance. Prose uses the light of the main character to contrast the shadows surrounding the supporting characters.

In Francine Prose, I may have found a writer of the likes of Greene, Maugham, and Leonard. These are the writers that know that the thoughts and actions of their characters are equally interesting things. They feed off one another, support one another, and oftentimes contradict one another. And these writers use this dance to create stories that reach far deeper into the human condition than stories of simple action alone. Definitely the best book I’ve read this year.