Word: swenson
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...Fashion model Charlotte Swenson returns to Manhattan, having just recovered from a catastrophic car accident in her hometown of Rockford, Illinois. The skin of her face is perfect, but behind it eighty titanium screws hold together the bones that were shattered when she hit the unbreakable windshield of her car. Unrecognizable to her peers and colleagues, Charlotte finds it impossible to resume her former life. Instead, she floats invisibly through a world of fashion nightclubs and edgy Internet projects, where image and reality are indistinguishable. During her recovery in Rockford, she has met another Charlotte, the plain-looking teenage daughter...
Mothers who try to control the closet rarely agree with their daughters on what that difference is. Mindful of her own teenage years, spent in halters and hot pants, Sandy Swenson struggles to find tasteful outfits that pass the cool bar for her daughter Kate, 14. But the Houston mother admits she prefers at times to retreat rather than fight over wardrobe. Shavetta McWhorter, a mother of two girls in Canton, Ga., takes a harder line. "I basically tell Asa, 12, 'You have two choices: you can dress like a young lady, or you can dress like a hoochie...
...middle-aged and marginally successful author, Ted Swenson can summon up only limp enthusiasm for the creative-writing course he teaches at a second-rate college in remote Vermont. Suffering through classes with unimaginative students and dinners with pedantic colleagues, the disgruntled professor of Francine Prose's abrasively comic new novel, Blue Angel (Harper Collins; 314 pages; $25), can't wait to rush home so he can avoid writing his overdue third novel. In addition to battling ennui, Swenson must also contend with a forbidding campus environment fraught with race and gender minefields...
Rather expectedly, he becomes attracted to a student, though his obsession arrives not in the dewy-eyed, nubile form but in the unlikely person of Angela Argo, a fierce, skinny and multipierced "punk Chihuahua" who offers up a novel, chapter by chapter, for Swenson's critique. Flummoxed by her talent and flattered by her praise, Swenson finds himself drawn to Angela in increasingly unprofessorial ways despite his seemingly sturdy marriage. Though he suspects she may be unstable--and a pathological liar to boot--Angela's pull leads Swenson to a bungled sexual encounter and what proves...
...senses Swenson's fate almost from his first meeting with Angela; not only does Prose repeatedly refer to the 1930 film Blue Angel, which features the debasement of an infatuated professor, but she has also constructed her collegiate climate as a latter-day Salem, tyrannized by the puritanical forces of sexual-harassment policies that demand some sacrifice. However, by presenting neither character as an obvious victim or villain, the novel maintains a level of suspense, momentum and humor. And though the hypocrisy of the political-correctness movement has been amply explored elsewhere, Prose still manages to find fresh ways...