http://ziamunshi.com/2007/01/can-i-just-tell-you-how-much-i-love-bookmooch/ Scratchings and Jotlings on Books, Houses, Pets, Art, the Exigencies of Daily Existence, and Other Ephemera Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:06:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 http://ziamunshi.com/2007/01/can-i-just-tell-you-how-much-i-love-bookmooch/#comment-8129 Nom de Plume » Blue Angel - Francine Prose Thu, 15 Feb 2007 15:00:34 +0000 http://ziamunshi.com/2007/01/04/can-i-just-tell-you-how-much-i-love-bookmooch/#comment-8129 [...] Have I mentioned how much I love bookmooch? Maybe once or twice … Prose, in typical fashion, turns her sharp, skewering eye on college writing programs and the paranoid atmosphere of sexual harassment in the 90s. Swenson, a professor of creative writing at a second-rate New England college, is in a rut. His own writing languishes, while his students are remarkably (to put it charitably) uninspired. When the talent and neediness of one of his students erupts into this stagnation, he is caught up in a heady sense of purpose, love, and obsession. Prose’s greatest achievement, to my mind, is her description of the interior life of Swenson–fabulous–though to some degree I can’t help but think of this novel as an update to Lurie’s somewhat dated War of the Tates. (And can I say that the blurb, which states that “Blue Angel does for creative writing programs what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle did for the meat-packing industry” is a little over the top?) [...] […] Have I mentioned how much I love bookmooch? Maybe once or twice … Prose, in typical fashion, turns her sharp, skewering eye on college writing programs and the paranoid atmosphere of sexual harassment in the 90s. Swenson, a professor of creative writing at a second-rate New England college, is in a rut. His own writing languishes, while his students are remarkably (to put it charitably) uninspired. When the talent and neediness of one of his students erupts into this stagnation, he is caught up in a heady sense of purpose, love, and obsession. Prose’s greatest achievement, to my mind, is her description of the interior life of Swenson–fabulous–though to some degree I can’t help but think of this novel as an update to Lurie’s somewhat dated War of the Tates. (And can I say that the blurb, which states that “Blue Angel does for creative writing programs what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle did for the meat-packing industry” is a little over the top?) […]

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