The Vixen
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Named one of the best books of 2021 by NPR, The Washington Post, and Financial Times
“No one states problems more correctly, more astutely, more amusingly and more uncomfortably than Francine Prose . . . The gift of her work to a reader is to create for us what she creates for her protagonist: the subtle unfolding, the moment-by-moment process of discovery as we read and change, from not knowing and even not wanting to know or care, to seeing what we had not seen and finding our way to the light of the ending.”—Amy Bloom, New York Times Book Review
"Depending on the light, it’s either a very funny serious story or a very serious funny story. But no matter how you turn it, The Vixen offers an illuminating reflection on the slippery nature of truth in America, then and now."—Washington Post
Critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose returns with a dazzling new novel set in the glamorous world of 1950s New York publishing, the story of a young man tasked with editing a steamy bodice-ripper based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg—an assignment that will reveal the true cost of entering that seductive, dangerous new world.
It’s 1953, and Simon Putnam, a recent Harvard graduate newly hired by a distinguished New York publishing firm, has entered a glittering world of three-martini lunches, exclusive literary parties, and old-money aristocrats in exquisitely tailored suits, a far cry from his loving, middle-class Jewish family in Coney Island.
But Simon’s first assignment—editing The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic, a lurid bodice-ripper improbably based on the recent trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, a potboiler intended to shore up the firm’s failing finances—makes him question the cost of admission. Because Simon has a secret that, at the height of the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings, he cannot reveal: his beloved mother was a childhood friend of Ethel Rosenberg’s. His parents mourn Ethel’s death.
Simon’s dilemma grows thornier when he meets The Vixen’s author, the startlingly beautiful, reckless, seductive Anya Partridge, ensconced in her opium-scented boudoir in a luxury Hudson River mental asylum. As mysteries deepen, as the confluence of sex, money, politics and power spirals out of Simon’s control, he must face what he’s lost by exchanging the loving safety of his middle-class Jewish parents’ Coney Island apartment for the witty, whiskey-soaked orbit of his charismatic boss, the legendary Warren Landry. Gradually Simon realizes that the people around him are not what they seem, that everyone is keeping secrets, that ordinary events may conceal a diabolical plot—and that these crises may steer him toward a brighter future.
At once domestic and political, contemporary and historic, funny and heartbreaking, enlivened by surprising plot turns and passages from Anya’s hilariously bad novel, The Vixen illuminates a period of history with eerily striking similarities to the current moment. Meanwhile it asks timeless questions: How do we balance ambition and conscience? What do social mobility and cultural assimilation require us to sacrifice? How do we develop an authentic self, discover a vocation, and learn to live with the mysteries of love, family, art, life and loss?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Prose (Mister Monkey) holds up a mirror to a fractured culture in this dazzling take on America's tendency to persecute, then lionize, its most subversive figures. In 1953, recent Harvard graduate Simon Putnam watches news of the Rosenberg execution on television with his parents in Brooklyn. Though Simon has profited from a Puritan-sounding name—and hopes to profit further—he's from a liberal Jewish family; his mother attended the same high school as Ethel Rosenberg (and even keeps a small shrine to her in their apartment). It's the height of the Red Scare, when "anyone could be accused" and "everyone was afraid." Flash forward a year, and Simon's literary critic uncle has landed him a job as junior editor at a prestigious but financially unstable publisher. When its founder, Warren Landry, gives Simon his first novel to edit, Simon is aghast to learn the project is a thinly veiled bodice ripper about the Rosenberg trial. It's an unusual book for the publisher, but Landry, a WWII veteran who once ran psyops for the OSS, lays out the stakes: the publisher needs a win, and a pulp yarn that further vilifies the Rosenbergs and Communism seems like just the thing. Why a junior editor would be given such an important task is a slow-burn mystery that propels readers through Prose's recreation of 1950s paranoia, complete with an appearance from Senator Joseph McCarthy's minion and future Trump mentor Roy Cohn. Sidelong commentary on Landry's sexual predation, shot through a lens informed by the #MeToo era, adds further resonance. This is Prose at the top of her game.
Customer Reviews
Pity about the ending
Author
American. Professor of Literature at Bard College. 20 published novels, 3 short story collections, 10 non-fiction books, innumerable essays and book reviews, and possibly the best name for a writer that I have ever heard.
Premise
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were American citizens convicted and executed in 1953 (the hey day of the McCarthy era) for spying for the Soviet Union, specifically for passing on highly classified information that facilitated development of the hydrogen bomb by the Soviets. Human rights campaigners in the US and Europe opposed their execution and claimed they were “set up” by the CIA. KGB archives released 50 years later confirmed that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy, and his wife an active ”fellow traveller.”
In brief
Simon Putnam is a young Jewish man from Coney Island, Brooklyn, fresh out of Harvard where he majored in Norse myths and sagas. (Fifty years earlier, an Ellis Island official with a sense of humour had bestowed the names of pilgrims from the Mayflower, such as Putnam, on Eastern Europe immigrants including his grandparents.) Our hero works as a junior editor at a high brow Manhattan publisher, where he is given the task of preparing for publication a “bodice-ripper” based on the Rosenberg case. Not only is the novel totally out of character with his employer’s imprint, the author is a mysterious and seductive young woman who lives in a rural “rest home” (read asylum) 40 miles upstate. Aside from the book’s many literary deficiencies, it portrays the thinly disguised Ethel Rosenberg character as a slutty and amoral seductress. Simon’s greatest dilemma is that his mother, who grew up in the same building as Ethel, has been plagued by ill health since the execution, which appalled her. Suffice it to say, Simon quickly finds himself in a power of sh*t. Parental advisory: the CIA is involved.
Writing
First person narrative of an unfailingly sincere protagonist that is both witty and complex—possibly even meta—and captures the time and place (the so called “flannel suit decade”) to perfection. Pity about the twee ending.
Bottom line
A five star read until the last couple of chapters. I was waiting for a twist in the tail that never arrived.
Footnote
I highly recommend the author’s 2006 non-fiction work Reading Like A Writer. (Assuming that is something you think you might want to do.)