Montage A Garden of Prose Don’t call it satire: Francine Prose’s novels are just smart and funny. by susan hodara

he 2,000-square-foot veg- Comparing her to Virginia Woolf, Atlas etable plot—planted with fava describes Prose as “a versatile woman of beans, peas, arugula, raspberries, letters in the old-fashioned sense,” and T even artichokes—that author novelist Larry McMurtry, in his review Francine Prose ’68, A.M. ’69, cultivates at of Prose’s Bigfoot Dreams (1986), called her her upstate New York home has become, “one of our finest writers.” she says, “an obsession. Sometimes I think Magical realism influenced her early I write for a few hours a day so I don’t have books, but “things took a radical turn in to feel guilty about working in the gar- the late ’80s, early ’90s, the Reagan-Bush den.” years,” she says. “I was horrified by what After more than 30 books, the first was happening around me. My work got published when she was 26, Prose’s guilt a lot more contemporary, a lot more po- should be nicely quelled. Her novels in- litical.” Her novels took on a more acer- clude Blue Angel (2000), a finalist for the bic tone, introducing readers to complex National Book Award, and Household Saints if not always likable characters such as Francine (1981), which was adapted into a film. Vera, who concocts fictitious stories for Prose She’s written short stories, young-adult a tabloid in Bigfoot Dreams, and the smug and children’s books, and nonfiction Hudson Valley socialites in Primitive People the grown-ups trot behind them, keeping ne prose ne works including the New York Times best- (1992), as viewed by a Haitian au pair. up their interrogations —how’s the food? i nc a

seller Reading Like a Writer (2006) and, most During this period, reviewers began your roommate? your math professor?— r F recently, Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the calling Prose’s fiction satirical, a label she questions their children ignore, walking Afterlife (2009; appearing in softcover this deplores. “I’m not satirizing,” she says. “I’m farther ahead….”

fall). Prose writes everything except, well, reporting. I’m describing the world I see.” “Yes, sometimes it’s funny,” Prose con- of courtesy poetry. Consider this portrayal in Blue Angel of par- tinues, “but my aim isn’t to satirize. My “Francine is one of the great writers ents on a college campus during visiting principal aim is to create characters, to get of her generation,” says James Atlas ’71, weekend: “How uncomfortable they are inside their consciousnesses.” president of the publishing imprint Atlas in the presence of their children! …These The range of those characters is remark- & Co., a friend since their college days. hulking boys and gum-chewing girls could able. Her narrators include a tattooed neo- (Prose’s 2005 Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles be visiting dignitaries or important busi- Nazi seeking redemption (A Changed Man), is part of the firm’s Eminent Lives series.) ness contacts, that’s how obsequiously a 13-year-old mourning her sister (Gold-

William Storrer hopes that 335 U.S. 595, 600 (1949). The someone can provide a source c hapter & verse correct wording is: “Wisdom for the quotation, supposedly too often never comes, and so Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words from Oswald Spengler’s De- one ought not to reject it merely cline of the West, that George because it comes late.” Richard reads aloud near the end of the second ends, “What truth soldiers would speak/ Spector’s reply was the first to reach us. act of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of None would hear, and none repeat.” Dominic Ayotte noted that the case does VirginiaWoolf? The text runs: “And the West, concern the estate tax. And Anthony encumbered by crippling alliances, and “Wisdom is so rare an attribute that Shipps offered the gentle reminder that burdened with a morality too rigid to it were better it come late than not a query about the same quotation ran in accommodate itself to the swing of at all” (July-August). We thank the more this column in May-June 1986, and was events, must…eventually…fall.” than two dozen readers—lawyers, law answered in the subsequent issue by B. professors, a judge, and a longtime pro- Abbott Goldberg and Erwin Griswold. Wesley Moore asks who wrote a short fessional Supreme Court watcher among unidentified poem, found on a web- them—who wrote to identify this mis- Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter site, that begins, “Stranger, go, tell the stated version of a comment by Justice and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Spartans--/No; simply say ‘we obeyed’.../ Felix Frankfurter, dissenting in Henslee v. Street, Cambridge 02138, or via e-mail to Make us sound laconic and all iron.…” and Union Planters National Bank & Trust Co., [email protected].

18 September - October 2010 Montage engrove), and a college professor novels (one is due out next tempted by an unlikely student summer, the other, a young- (Blue Angel). “The joy of trying to adult novel, after that), Prose see the world through the eyes of is working on a third, based on someone as different from yourself the life of Violette Morris, one as possible is hugely liberating,” of the women in the Brassaï’s Prose says. “Regardless of who photograph “Lesbian Couple at they are, their views of the world Le Monocle.” The book began must be as nuanced and layered as as a nonfiction study of Morris, mine and my friends’ are.” contemporary Americans, with all their in- a French professional athlete re- The central element in accomplishing ternal contradictions, solipsism and general cruited by the Nazis as a spy. But the work this is language. “It’s about hearing the screwed-upness, is guided more by the spir- bogged down until Prose recast it as fic- language they speak inside their heads,” it of compassion than by that of mockery.” tion. “Suddenly the idea of she explains. Listen to what’s going on in- A tall woman with porcelain skin, Prose seeing the Berlin Olympics side Vincent Nolan’s head on a crowded and her husband, the artist Howard Mi- from the perspective of a fu- Manhattan street early in A Changed Man: chels, moved upstate to raise their sons, rious lesbian athlete became Hear Francine Prose talk “He’s never seen it this bad. A giant mosh now 31 and 27; they divide their time be- fascinating,” she says. about her pit with cars. Just walking demands con- tween the town of Olivebridge and their Each project follows a writing process centration, like driving in heavy traffic. Manhattan apartment. Her time at Har- similar trajectory that she at harvardmag. He remembers the old Times Square on vard, which included a summa cum laude claims doesn’t get easier. com/extras. those righteous long-ago weekends when degree and a couple of years as a graduate “First drafts are really hard,” she says. “It’s he and his high school friends took the student, provided “all the tools you need different from book to book, but they’re bus into the city to get hammered and as a writer. Language, narrative, dialogue, always a slog, and I never feel I’ve learned eyeball the hookers.” voice—it was all there,” she says. “No one anything from one to the next. And there Validating Prose’s own stance, Andrew sat me down and said, ‘This is what you’re are moments of great despair.” O’Hehir writes in his Salon.com review of learning,’ but I was.” Like Blue Angel’s protagonist, Prose has A Changed Man that her “desire to capture Having recently completed two new taught creative writing. Since 2000, she has

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been visiting professor of literature and inducted into the American Academy of idation,” Prose says. “The people making Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard Arts and Letters, the 112-year-old institu- those selections are not critics; they have College. She has received Guggenheim and tion composed of 250 architects, compos- nothing to do with the commercial world. Fulbright fellowships and in May was ers, artists, and writers. “It was such a val- They are us. It feels really good.”

the New Yorker and the London Re- at Boston University, studies the civic view of Books. Shapin does all these development of adolescents. One impor- Off the Shelf things well, so it is rewarding to tant example is the student-run Harvard have this collection of his writings Square Homeless Shelter, where oppor- Recent books with Harvard connections about the human nature of science, tunities arise to “do passion well.” conducted as it is by people “strug- gling for credibility and authority.” Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists, by Ga- Reputation and Power, by Daniel Car- briella Blum, assistant professor of law, penter, Freed professor of government Modern Architecture: Representa- and Philip B. Heymann, Ames professor (Princeton, $29.95 paper). At a time of tion and Reality, by Neil Levine, Gleason of law (MIT, $21.95). A reflective critique debate over government and regulation professor of history of art and architecture of the war on terror, conducted in what (oil spills or financial crises, anyone?), the (Yale, $65). A sweeping “postmodern view” the authors call a “No-Law Zone.” They director of Harvard’s Center for Ameri- of architecture’s development across three aim to demonstrate that “the nation loses can Political Studies delivers the defini- centuries, profusely illustrated. when either national security or the rule tive (752 pages) analysis of the Food and of law wholly vanquishes the other at a Drug Administration and pharmaceutical Taking Back Eden, by Oliver A. Houck time of emergency.” For a perspective on regulation. He finds that such power “co- ’60 (Island Press, $35). A Tulane law pro- the same problems by the authors’ Law heres well with the Federalists’ vision of fessor narrates eight landmark environ- School colleague Charles Fried and his ‘strong’ government” and that “the cen- mental lawsuits, including the one involv- son, Gregory, see page 36. tral criterion of strong governance is… ing Con Edison’s power-plant plans for legitimated vigor.” Storm King Mountain, along the Hudson, Handing One Another Along, by litigated by his College class- Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry and mate, Albert K. Butzel (also medical humanities emeritus (Random LL.B. ’64). House, $26). Drawing from his “Litera- ture of Social Reflection” (Gen. Ed. 105) Listen to This, by Alex Ross course, the author pursues moral under- ’90 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, standing through stories of others, drawn $27). “[M]usic criticism is a from literature and from his life, including curious and dubious science,” meeting William Carlos Williams, the sub- says its premier practitioner. ject of his English thesis. This is the first collection of his New Yorker essays, follow- Facing Catastrophe, by Robert R.M. ing publication of his acclaimed Verchick, J.D. ’89 (Harvard, $45). What The site of a foundational environmental lawsuit, as book on twentieth-century better vantage point (unfortunately) for rendered a century earlier in Samuel Colman’s Storm esource esource R King on the Hudson (1866) classical music, The Rest Is studying the subject than Loyola Uni- Noise. (Ross was profiled in the versity’s law school, in New Orleans? ./Art ./Art C The Shape of Inner Space, by Shing- July-August 2008 issue of this magazine.) The author offers an environmental-law Tung Yau, Graustein professor of math- perspective on disasters. He suggests re- ngton, D. ngton, hi s

a ematics, and Steve Nadis (Basic Books, Exploring Happiness, by Sissela Bok, specting natural buffers, attending to pub- $30). An exploration of the geometry Ph.D. ’70 (Yale, $24). The author, now se- lic health and safety, and anticipating risks.

useum, W useum, underlying much work in string theory, by nior visiting fellow at the Center for Pop- M the scholar who made the decisive proof ulation and Development Studies, turns In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of Amer- n Art Art n a c i in the field, with a collaborating writer. Lay her attention from such past subjects as ica’s Educational Landmark, by Mar- readers will still find the vocabulary and Lying, Mayhem, and Secrets to the nature tha Minow, dean, Harvard Law School n Amer n ia underlying ideas strange and challenging. of happiness and its representation from (Oxford, $24.95). The project of attaining son h t i philosophy to contemporary science. equal educational opportunity regardless m S Never Pure, by Steven Shapin, Ford of race remains unfulfilled. But Minow professor of the history of science (Johns Shelter: Where Harvard Meets the finds that the impact of Brown v. Board Hopkins, $70; $30 paper). Few historians Homeless, by Scott Seider ’99, Ed.D. ’08 of Education has been far wider—in the of science proceed from Woody Allen or (Continuum, $80; $22.95 paper). The au- classroom, in society at large, and even in Monty Python. But few review elegantly for thor, an assistant professor of education the global realm of human rights.

20 September - October 2010