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    Blue Angel: A Novel
    Blue Angel: A Novel
    Blue Angel: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    Blue Angel: A Novel

    Written by Francine Prose

    Narrated by Zach Villa

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The National Book Award Finalist from acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Francine Prose—now the major motion picture Submission
     
    “Screamingly funny … Blue Angel culminates in a sexual harassment hearing that rivals the Salem witch trials.” —USA Today

    It's been years since Swenson, a professor in a New England creative writing program, has published a novel. It's been even longer since any of his students have shown promise. Enter Angela Argo, a pierced, tattooed student with a rare talent for writing. Angela is just the thing Swenson needs. And, better yet, she wants his help. But, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

    Deliciously risque, Blue Angel is a withering take on today's academic mores and a scathing tale that vividly shows what can happen when academic politics collides with political correctness.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateOct 30, 2018
    ISBN9780062883483
    Author

    Francine Prose

    Francine Prose is the author of twenty-two works of fiction including the highly acclaimed The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

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    Reviews for Blue Angel

    3.5/5

    246 ratings16 reviews

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    • 3/5
      2.5 stars. The professor thinks he has a good marriage but he lives in a fantasy world where women all adore him and listen attentively to his pearls of wisdom. When he succumbs to the temptation of a talented young student (Angela) his life quickly spirals out of control. I liked the way the author used so many writing styles so effectively. (I learned more about the art of writing.) But I found the book as a whole disappointing.
    • 1/5
      For some strange reason, I stuck with this book, though I definitely don't recommend it. It was 3/4 through the book that I realized that I didn't like the characters, didn't like where it was going, and yet, something stuck. I think because I responded so strongly to the characters of Swenson and Angela, there's something about it. But, I'd never ever reread it.
    • 3/5
      I'm not sure why the author bothered to write Blue Angel. The protagonist isn't terribly interesting or sympathetic, there wasn't much of a plot, and I expected to enjoy the writing more. The book did have some laugh-out-loud moments, however. Meh...
    • 4/5
      The novel Blue Angel by Francine Prose is a contemporary novel whose plot and tone are loosely based on the 1930 Marlene Dietrich tragicomedic German film, The Blue Angel. Its hapless protagonist is Ted Swenson, a creative writing professor at Euston, a small, second-tier, liberal arts college in Vermont. He's also published a successful semi-autobiographical novel, Blue Angel, and has been unproductively working on another one for years. But writer's block is the least of Swenson's problems. From an outside perspective, he seems to have it pretty good, a secure tenured position, a loving wife who he remains attracted to, a country home, a middle-class life. But at 47, he's bored and annoyed by his untalented students, loathes all but one of his professorial colleagues, seems not particularly suited to life in the New England boondocks and is otherwise ripe for a self-destructive mid-life crisis. Enter Angela Argo, a skinny, awkward, leather-clad and pierced, punkish student who can actually write. And the theme of her novel - yes you've got it - a liaison between a high school student and her teacher. Prose's strength is the humor she brings to describing the pretensions of academia, political correctness, and gender politics, and the fun she pokes at students and professors alike. But underneath the winks and nods and satire, is a sad and cautionary tale of self-destruction and confusion. As in Shakespeare, the line between tragedy and comedy is indeed thin.
    • 4/5
      The title of this novel comes from Josef von Sternberg's silent classic about an uptight middle-aged schoolteacher who's helplessly seduced by cabaret singer Marlene Dietrich; at the end, he's debased into playing a "slobbering clown". And thusly goes the inexorable journey of Prose's morally repugnant yet simultaneously lovable protagonist, Ted Swenson.Swenson, a formerly critically acclaimed novelist, procrastinates on his next book while teaching creative writing at a second rate liberal arts school whose obsessive Puritanism has given forth to strict codes of sexual conduct and classes that ought to be named "Gender Warfare in the White Male's Novel". In the atmosphere of this moral panic, Swenson all too easily realizes himself to be an integral part of the false pieties that haunt this college campus like moral ghosts.Though happily married to his wife Sherrie, his ensuing pseudo affair with his student Angela, as the title itself indicates, comes as no surprise. But, instead of meditating on predatory power structures and railing against patriarchy, Prose cleverly and humorously upends this trope. Prose satirically skewers some of our most cherished beliefs about literature and society itself: that men are inherently aggressors and that high intellect is positively correlated to high moral value. Swenson slowly, and passively, commits moral suicide, while Angela is no Nabokovian "nypmhette," but a calculating woman that has devised the protagonist's downfall to her own economical benefit.In Blue Angel, Prose takes acerbic account of the nexus between political correctness and the reality of living life itself, and the results are both somber and hilarious.
    • 3/5
      Well, this book just seemed a little too predictable to me. I was pretty much guessing the entire outcome within the first 50 pages. It follows the classic professor falling for a college student ruse but I liked it better when it was called The Corrections and when that wasn't the entire premise of the story. That it's written from a female perspective while the protagonist is male is the only thing that makes the book slightly tricky and interesting. Still, it's so clear what will happen that it makes reading it almost painful to get through. I wasn't sure if we were actually supposed to feel sorry for the professor for being so pathetic, either...Regardless, it's somewhat enigmatic to me how this got to be a National Book Award Finalist. Oh well.
    • 4/5
      This was a novel about a college creative writing professor whose place of employment set up a committee that wanted to put into practice sanctions against those who practice sexual harrassment. Wouldn't you know it, then, that the married professor in our story becomes attracted to Angeo Argo, one of his students! According to Professor Swenson, the reason is that she writes well. He thinks he feels that she is attracted to him as well. Not all goes acording to plan as you shall see when you read this story.I found this an engaging read while my daughter thought it a "meh" book. Her fiance disliked the book completely and ranted that its ending was no ending at all. I was satisfied with it. You decide for yourself when you read it.
    • 4/5
      Francine Prose’s Blue Angel is easy to summarize: a heretofore upstanding creative writing professor at a small liberal arts college becomes infatuated with one of his students, and things deteriorate from there. It’s satire all the way, but at times it’s not that funny, just sad.It’s likely I would have liked this novel more had I read it when it was published 10 years ago. Unfortunately, it has not aged all that well. The idiocies of political correctness are now embedded like a tapeworm in the gut of academia, so the indignities that inevitably befall the hapless Swenson are predictable from the book’s first page. Speaking of Prof. Bathos himself, let’s just say that Prose doesn’t entirely succeed in creating a convincing protagonist. Swenson’s day-to-day foibles and tics are fine; he’s believable. But when push comes to (sweaty and very naughty) shove, his motivations evaporate. Prose doesn’t really grasp the male mind – or, rather, drive. Swenson makes stupid choices. But Prose can’t get behind that stupidity; she doesn’t help us feel Swenson’s desperation as he tries to take on mortality and lost meaning in hopeless single combat. Instead, even though she tries hard (to her credit) to help us sympathize with Swenson’s predicament, she ends up tsk-tsking him just like the gaggle of women who surround him.Prose is an excellent prose stylist, and although I didn’t find this book to be a complete winner, I will try some of her other novels.
    • 3/5
      Blue Angel more than held my interest and Prose is a good writer with an edge to her, but the plot was fairly predictable and this book didn't finish strong.What I liked:- Commentary on writing (and reading); the main character is a teacher of a creative writing class at a small college which allows for this."Isn't that what he told the class yesterday, that good writing can make you see your fellow humans? It doesn't make you a better person. It just sort of ... opens your pores."- Humor; particularly in the inner thoughts interspersed with the dialog."Marmite! Is there no end to the Benthams' sadism? What will they be serving next - wobbly slabs of jellied calves feet? Steak and kidney pie? If Marjorie knows that most Americans - most humans - don't like Marmite, why is it the only hors d'eouevre? Swenson gobbles his Triscuit in one brave bite and tries not to make a face at the sharp wheaty splinters glued together with vile salty paste. Attentive as baby birds, the other guests wait for him to gulp it down.""Most of the students are still reading, giving Swenson a moment to think of something to say, some way to improve this heartbreaking, subliterate piece of shit, heartbreaking because, for all he knows, it represents Courtney's personal best."- Theme and commentary on what amounts to a mid-life crisis; the unbreakable obsession and the guilt in the relationship that devlopes between teacher and manipulative student."No one knows that Angela's poems are in his office at home, locked in his filing cabinet. Or that her filthy free verse has traveled here in his head, lilke some malarial mosquito sneaking across the ocean in an airplane's passenger cabin."What I disliked:- The ending. Awful. Especially the last couple of pages.- The crassness. The repeated references to increst and bestality are unnecessary and over-the-top. My first thought: as much of the bestiality references are meant as humor, make the joke once! Second thought: while these do set an overall tone, it's hard not to feel like they're included for shock value only.A few more quotes for the road:"Swenson's spirt used to soar on the updraft of transcendence that the library's valuted arches were designed to produce. Every so often he still gets a buzz in the presence of two thousand years of poetry, art, history, science - the whispery proximity of all those dear dead voices. But lately, he's more likely to feel the dizzying chasm between what Elijah Euston dreamed and what his dream has become, between the lofty heights of Western culture and the everyday grubbiness of education at Euston.""Is this some kind of gay bar? Len would never do that. Besides, too many heads are swiveling to follow the round, gray-suited rear end of the woman leading Sweson to his table.""'How's school?' It's not as if Sweson hasn't asked forty times this weekend. But that's one privilege of family life - the right to ignore good manners and the fear of boring others, to repeat things and get the same answers."
    • 5/5
      This is a wonderful recounting of how a slightly befuddled creative writing professor is hoodwinked by his more savvy, very talented student. What he thinks of as a bittersweet romance between the old guard and the up-and-coming talent she sees as merely a business transaction on her way to getting published. The novel is enthralling and well written with intriguing, very real characters. Anyone who has sat through a college creative writing workshop will wince and grin as they read those scenes in particular.
    • 3/5
      At the beginning, this book was a bit of a page turner. While the characters are very well written, the plot left me asking, "What now?" The story line always kept me guessing but it didn't live up to expectations.The protaganist, Ted, comes off as slightly narcissitic but you end up rooting for him in the end. Ted's relationship with his writing student Angela shows how complex and round this simple college professor is. Even the seemingly minor characters play a part in Ted's realization and unraveling. This books should be read for the characters, not for the plot.
    • 4/5
      By all appearances, Theodore "Ted" Swenson is living the sweet life. He's a tenured professor at Euston, a bucolic New England college; he's published a well-received novel; and his beautiful wife is smart, warm, and humorous. Ted's even managed to craftily pare down his teaching schedule and office hours to a bare minimum of acceptability. What more could a man wish for? Of course, small irritations have a way of slowly rubbing the good life raw. Swenson's creative writing students are painfully mediocre. How, for instance, can Swenson have any reasonable chance of improving Danny Liebman's tortured short story in which a teenager, drunk and spurned by his girlfriend, indulges in sexual congress with a raw chicken by the light of the family fridge? In addition, Swenson's new novel, "The Black and the Black," seems to be permanently consigned to creative purgatory, and the campus administration's recent obsession with political correctness has been whipped into a frenzy by the Faculty-Student Women's Alliance, a group headed by Swenson's arch enemy, Lauren Healy, who is perpetually offended by Swenson's crime of owning a penis. When Swenson finally stumbles upon a student with true talent, he can't believe his good fortune. Angela Argo is writing a novel, and it's good -- really good. Angela (an avid fan of Stendahl, by the way) is effusive in her praise of Swenson's first novel, and a series of office visits ensue. Thank heaven she's so physically unappealing. Swenson's avoided any scintilla of scandal for twenty years, and this skinny, scab-kneed waif with dirty hair, nose rings, and multiple lip piercings is about as far from a ripe freshman Lolita as he can imagine. Well, life is full of surprises. I highly recommend this book. The fatuous rationalizations that Swenson manufactures with each escalating step of his inappropriate behavior, the predictable reaction of Swenson's "friends" and foes, and the haplessness of the human condition are all exposed with humor and pathos by Ms. Prose. Enjoy.
    • 3/5
      Francine Prose's novel is a well-written spoof of academia. She successfully parodies both the ersatz avant garde students and the politically-correct administration while leaving the hero (?) caught in the middle. Ted Swenson is a writer and professor but an unlikable hero; however, he seems almost sympathetic by the end of the story. At least he appears to have learned his lesson, or is that a mirage like many of the emotions displayed by his antagonist. Much of the book seems designed to tease the reader but the intelligence of the author shines through and carries the reader forward. A book worthy of your consideration.
    • 2/5
      Prose has received a lot of good press for her latest novel, A Changed Man, but, of course, my library branch didn't have that book in stock. I didn't want to have to wait for it to be ordered, so I picked up the book before that one, Blue Angel. It's the story of a creative-writing professor in a small-town college who tries to walk the fine line between loving a student's work and loving the student. It's meant to be a satire of the overly sensitive sexual harassment policies in academia, but the protagonist is so screwed up it's hard to feel sorry for the guy, let alone laugh at his plight. The characters never seem real, hardly any them are sympathetic, and the novel ends with an unsatisfying, unclear, and unnecessary twist.
    • 2/5
      This was a National Book Award Finalist!? You could have fooled me. I found the characters unappealing & poorly drawn. I only stuck w/ it to see what would happen to the main character, Prof. Ted Swenson.
    • 2/5
      love scandal between a student and a professor. somewhat inevitable and predictable ending. nothing too serious, but fast read and good for past time.