Details
Synopsis
A creative-writing professor enmeshed in his own midlife crisis becomes obsessed with one of his students: a pierced, punky girl named Angela who, against all logic, turns out to be a good writer. As her hero copes with troubles ranging from marital to professional, Francine Prose's satirical novel of academia surveys campus life with a humorous eye and overturns some stereotypes in the process. Nominated for a National Book Award, BLUE ANGEL was also a New York Times Notable Book for the year 2000.
| Size | | Length: | 314 pages | | Height: | 9.8 in | | Width: | 7.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 20.8 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "Swenson waits for his students to complete their private rituals, adjusting zippers and caps, arranging the pens and notebooks so painstaking chosen to express their tender young selves, the fidgety ballets that signal their weekly submission and reaffirm the social compact to be stuck in this room for an hour without real food or TV."
Industry Reviews
"Happily, Prose neither wholly condemns either character nor absolves them of their multiple weaknesses and errors. Rather, she charts the limits of their visions and the chaotic, destructive results of their actions, and lets the reader be the judge. It is this intricacy, this ever-shifting, boglike moral ground, that gives the novel its comic power and its depth....Where Prose is weaker is in her rendering of some of the minor characters. While Prose's intentions here are clearly satiric, the renderings feel overly familiar and cartoonish, parodies that remain too one-note, too stretched and simplified to be convincing....The result is that while her exploration of the foibles of political correctness is occasionally funny, sometimes the results fall flat. 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."
Graver
"This is among the most enjoyable books I've read in a long time and, once started...I couldn't stop turning the pages until there were none left....What makes Prose's novel so good is...the prose. (After a dozen books, one can imagine how tired she must feel of such wordplay.) Throughout, her sentences flow effortlessly, neat and slightly dry, sometimes a little tart; they offer civilized pleasure....You shouldn't expect this to be some major work of modern American fiction, but it is zingy literary entertainment..., and the pages will fly by as you read them."
Dirda
"The early sections of the novel are at once highly entertaining and strangely mesmerizing; the atmosphere is doom-laden and world-weary...but regularly illuminated by flashes of easy, idiomatic comedy. Prose has a wonderful ear for dialogue....The really curious thing about BLUE ANGEL is the pains it takes to insist on the fundamental innocence of its male protagonist. It is reiterated so many times that...one cannot help but get suspicious."
Times Literary Supplement - Gregory Dart (06/15/2001)
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