Blue Angel

by Francine Prose

  But that is just how it appears now. Not necessarily how it was. Angela’s the only one who knows—who will ever know—the truth.

  Swenson’s not planning anything as he walks downstairs. If his mind weren’t empty, he couldn’t move at all. There’s a flutter of uncertainty, he’s heading in the wrong direction. Hey, that creep in the camouflage pants is unpacking his weapon! But he’s a civilized professor, so they must assume he’s coming up to shake his colleagues’ hands.

  Instead he goes over to Angela. He knows he’s standing too close. Angela’s father and Matt tense. Swenson can feel it without looking. He puts his face next to Angela’s. Matt puts out his arm, protecting Angela, not quite touching Swenson. Her father does the same. Their reflex, their posture, the entire scene is patriarchal, biblical. They should be bare-chested, wearing turbans and beards in some Renaissance painting.

  Then the men and Angela’s mother float out of Swenson’s peripheral field, and his gaze swims toward Angela, past her clothes, his clothes, her skin, his skin, her body, his body. His soul is swimming toward hers like some desperate little sardine looking for that ocean they navigated together, when she was bringing him chapters and wanted to know what he thought, and he put off telling her until he couldn’t wait any longer.

  Angela’s eyes take in everything and give nothing back, certainly not the slightest sign that she’s ever met Swenson before. All the air has been sucked from the room. Swenson feels like he’s drowning.

  He says, “Just tell me one thing, okay? What the fuck were you doing?”

  “Huh?” says Angela. “What?”

  “Ted!” says Lauren. “Control yourself. Please. Act like an adult.” Her request—or is it a warning?—is taken up by the other committee members.

  Maybe what they’re objecting to is Swenson cutting so directly to the chase. Or maybe all they hear is Swenson saying fuck to a student.

  Francis Bentham, their fearless leader, wades into the standoff. He gently grabs Swenson’s elbow. Swenson shakes off his hand. He’s breathing shallowly, something’s blurring his vision, but unfortunately, consciousness hasn’t deserted him. He understands that if he takes this further, makes a fuss, it will only get worse. Sadly, he’s aware enough to know that he couldn’t bear it, couldn’t stand being hustled out of this joint by Matt and Angela’s father. Oh, where was that sensible, self-protective voice when he went to Angela Argo’s dorm room?

  What a favor they’re all doing him, showing him their true selves. What could he have been thinking to have wasted almost twenty years here? But he’s still got time left. He should be thanking Angela! Had this not happened, he’d have stayed at Euston, secure, preembalmed—till he grew old and died and never noticed that he was in hell. He’s not being fired, he’s being promoted from the inferno to purgatory. Swenson knows he’s not having an optimistic moment so much as an intimation of what an optimistic moment might feel like.

  He won’t allow Benthan to touch him, but he lets himself be walked upstairs. Professor Rath being driven from the Blue Angel by the angry mob.

  “We’ll be in touch,” says Bentham, but Swenson doesn’t answer. Hunched against the shocking cold, he walks onto the snowy quad.

  The lawns and paths are empty. Soft curls of mist rise above the snow and give the edges of things an unfocused cottony blur. The college buildings have never looked so lovely, their austere white clapboard, colonial brick, and gothic stone beauty untainted by nostalgia or by personal sadness at his being about to leave them. Swenson feels like a tourist visiting some historic site. He feels chosen, privileged to be here!

  Just at that moment, a deer—a doe—appears and gingerly minces along the path. She looks at Swenson, who looks back. The doe stares at him calmly, with something like—he could swear it—the affirmation or understanding he tried and failed to get from Angela. Which medieval saint saw the cross between the horns of the stag? Obviously, the deer is a sign of hope, of possibility and forgiveness. Perhaps a reincarnation of one of Elijah Euston’s daughters. Suddenly, the doe lifts its head, and stands there. Attentive, listening. What does she hear that Swenson doesn’t?

  A moment later, he does hear. The bells tolling, joyously raucous. What victory are they celebrating? The beginning of Swenson’s new life? Somehow that seems unlikely. How beautiful they sound! All his years here, he never listened, never responded except with impatience and annoyance. But who could blame him? He was up too close. The bells interrupted his classes, resonated in his skull. He remembers staring at Angela while the bells tolled the hour. He checks his watch. It’s twenty-five past, so why are they ringing now?

  Then gradually, it dawns on him. It’s the Women’s Alliance, announcing their triumph over another male oppressor, one small step along the path toward a glorious future. He’s glad to be out of that future and headed into his own. Not that he’s sure what his will bring. He’ll just have to wait and see.

  Why didn’t the bells frighten off the deer? Even as their ghost echo fades, the doe calmly crosses the quad, delicate, flamingo-like, poking her nose in the snow. From farther away, she turns again, and looks through the mist at Swenson. What is she seeing? What does she expect? Swenson has no idea. But how strangely lighthearted he feels, what a relief it is to admit, even just for one moment, how much he will never know.

  About the Author

  Francine Prose is the author of thirteen books of fiction, including the novel Blue Angel, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent book is The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired. A recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, she was a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in New York City.

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  More Raves for Francine Prose’s

  Blue Angel

  “It will be apparent that Blue Angel is the sort of scandalous book that zealots would be well advised to shun. Once you start reading it, you’ll be hooked. It’s not that Prose has simply reversed the politically correct line for mischief’s sake. Rather, she has upped the stakes by making Angela as unknowable as Nabokov’s Lolita, but—utterly unlike her nymphet predecessor—plain, ambitious and rebelliously an artist on her own account.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “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.”

  —Time

  “What makes her story particularly gripping and outrageous is how much you care for Swenson, who, after all, is in love with his wife, is sincerely concerned for his students, and is an essentially tolerant and sensible man.”

  —New York Times

  “Prose is a pro, and this funny yet devastating novel will rock literary and academic worlds alike.”

  —Mademoiselle

  “A mesmerizing and hilarious tour de force.”

  —US Weekly

  “Screamingly funny.”

  —USA Today

  “What makes Prose’s novel so good is…the prose. Throughout, her sentences flow effortlessly, neat and slightly dry, sometimes a little tart; they offer civilized pleasure like that cold Chardonnay…. It is zingy, literary entertainment.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Ms. Prose’s novels are powerful precisely because of the way the buried seriousness infuses and transforms works that nonetheless remain comic in their intent and effect…some of the great pleasure in the book lies in riding the roller coaster of its dramatic unfolding.”

  —New York Observer

  “Her trenchant satire of sexual harassment gives political correctness a much-deserved poke in the eye.”

  —Vanity Fair
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  “Professional inertia, the unexpected sexual tensions of middle age, and the psychic terrorism and hypocrisy that infect hot-button issues all stalk the slippery halls of academe in Francine Prose’s engaging new comedy yanked straight from that perplexity: modern life…. Lucky us. Blue Angel is heavenly.”

  —Miami Herald

  “Blue Angel is a merciless satire.”

  —Sun-Sentinel

  “Prose’s satire is sharp and unsparing—on campus life and writing workshops, and the banality and viciousness of today’s social orthodoxies. It’s significant, coming from a female novelist, that the female in this case acts wrongly, maybe even maliciously…. A book sure to be argued over and discussed, and one that should be.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Blue Angel is a wicked novel, but it is also, to its credit, quite sad; buried amid the jokes and send-ups of a terminally righteous academic milieu is the more poignant tale of a man whose foibles have eclipsed his dreams.”

  —Boston Globe

  “An elegant satire…. Pulling off a clever, funny, original send-up of contemporary academia isn’t easy, given the other talented practitioners of the scene, such as Jane Smiley. But Ms. Prose succeeds, thanks to the marvelous Swenson.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “Francine Prose, a literary arsonist with blistering wit, sends up both smug academics and politically correct undergrads in the satirical bonfire Blue Angel.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “In the end, though, this is a novel more about one man’s crashing journey toward a new life than it is about contemporary academic mores. It is a novel, too, about lying and self-delusion, about ego and desire, about the fragile self.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “What Prose performs at the end of Blue Angel is as neat a sleight of hand as has been seen in the libraries of university novels written in this century.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Francine Prose has been steadily producing novels, short stories, and criticism shot through with corrosive wit and searing intelligence, and Blue Angel represents a high-water mark in her estimable career. This is a gorgeous novel, the literary life laid bare in the tradition of George Gissing and John Updike, academe presented with the lofty compassion that Randall Jarrell brought to Pictures from an Institution, and a comedy of sexual manners that not only had me laughing out loud, but writhing with suspense.”

  —Scott Spencer

  “Blue Angel is a smart-bomb attack on academic hypocrisy and cant, and Francine Prose, an equal opportunity offender, is as politically incorrect on the subject of sex as Catullus and twice as funny. What a deep relief it is, in these dumbed-down Late Empire days, to read a world-class satirist who’s also a world-class storyteller.”

  —Russell Banks

  “Part Orwell, part Crucible, Blue Angel is a darkly funny look at the paranoid star-chamber world of sexual correctness in the American university system—Dobie Gillis plunged into Dante’s Inferno. Against a backdrop of tenure-clutching terror, Francine Prose is once again the great defender of the all-too-human: the weak-willed, the inconsistent, the hungry-hearted and all other sinners caught between their own personal demons and the mandates of our increasingly Puritanical culture. A defiant and compassionate novel by a great writer.”

  —Richard Price

  “Prose is pitch-perfect, parody-wise. She can deliver the politics of the writing class, the insanity of the work, the wacky, empty vigor of the discussions. She can parody bad writing, then can parody good writing…. Yet I feel that Prose is up to more here than just handily trotting the tired horse of the academic novel—to say nothing of the nag that is the sexual-harassment issue—around the track again. What she’s working on is the small canvas of the guy, embroidering the trivial theme of the guy…a confident, breezy foray by a woman into a man’s unheroic, suburban heart.”

  —Book Forum

  “An engaging comedy of manners…. Prose once again proves herself one of our great cultural satirists.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Blue Angel is a writer’s delight.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Blue Angel is both surprising and compelling, that rare thing called a really good novel. Prose combines insight, situation, character and flawless sentences, and against the odds manages to make Swenson, ‘the kind of guy who can have no idea what’s going on until after it’s happened,’ both sympathetic and deserving of his demise. Blue Angel makes the point—that men are more often stupid than they are merciless cads, and that ambition knows no gender—the way Chekhov may have made it: with one eye on cold reality and the other on compassion…. Smooth, smart and altogether engaging.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Compelling and fascinating to behold.”

  —Library Journal

  Also by Francine Prose

  Guided Tours of Hell

  Hunters and Gatherers

  The Peaceable Kingdom

  Primitive People

  Women and Children First

  Bigfoot Dreams

  Hungry Hearts

  Household Saints

  Animal Magnetism

  Marie Laveau

  The Glorious Ones

  Judah the Pious

  A Changed Man

  Credits

  Cover design by Barbara DeWilde

  Copyright

  BLUE ANGEL. Copyright © 2000 by Francine Prose. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © February 2005 ISBN: 9780061864902

  Version 06082012

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

  Prose, Francine.

  Blue angel : a novel / Francine Prose.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

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