#BlogTour ‘The Vixen’ by Francine Prose

About the book…

“Francine Prose is a powerhouse. The Vixen will fascinate and complicate the histories that haunt our present moments. Like Coney Island’s Cyclone, this story tumbles and tangles a reader’s grip of reality. It’s told with the heart, humor and daring of a true artist. Prose’s Vixen is a triumph and a trip though the solid magic that books make real.”—Samantha Hunt

“A rollicking trickster of a novel, wondrously funny and wickedly addictive.”—Maria Semple 

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?

Huge thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for the opportunity to read and review ‘The Vixen’ which is published by Harper in e-book and hardcover formats from August 5th.

The first thing to mention about this novel, is that the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg trail was a real one, the picture on the cover depicts the final kiss before they were taken, separately, to the execution chambers. They were electrocuted and, by all accounts, Ethel’s death was a traumatising experience for those who witnessed it. However, from some corners, this would have been viewed as well deserved-the justification for her alleged behaviour was the same as those who decried her, ‘she was just being a wife’.

Beginning with the narrator, Simon, watching the news updates on the Rosenberg execution, interspersed between slices of Americana viewed on shows like ‘‘Ozzie and Harriet’, or ‘I Love Lucy’, the sense of time and place is both vivid and eerily prescient.

The manipulation of the public, by the media, using forced and archaic stereotypes has never been more relevant and terrifying. With the advent of fake news, deep fakes and so on, people are using platforms to question the relevance of objective truth like never before, but how, where and why do we go in search of the essential nature of the situation we are examining? And what are the consequences?

Here, Simon is a Harvard graduate with all of the kudos but little of the knowledge of the privilege that it brings, he is the pride of his parents , having been raised in a Jewish household but not really acknowledging the impact his heritage has on his life-in the very beginning he notes that his name is not even a literal translation of the relative he is named after. It appears that adherence to, and belief in, the American way of life and anti-fascism are supposed to go hand in hand. And yet…this Jewish couple are being singled out as symbolic of being anti-American, no one has looked into their convictions as being anti-fascist, they seem to be conveniently scape-goated.

So when Simon has to edit, and become involved in a thinly disguised , fictionalised account of the trial in order to potentially save the small publishing house he has started work in, he has tough decisions to make.

Does he use his personal knowledge of his familial relationship with the Rosenbergs to present an alternative viewpoint to the world?

Or does he use his influence on asylum based writer, Anya  Partridge (was that name deliberately chosen to reflect ‘‘The Partridge Family’?) who has created the novel, ‘The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic’ to change the narrative?

This novel is deeply affecting,outrageously funny in the excepts which are shared from the novel, and moving in the way that is encourages the reader to compare their moral code with the one which are presented as an idyll to aspire to. Simon’s voice is so clear, right from page one, he takes you into the story, the time he lives in , and his intellectual challenges. And as an aside, his degree in folklore and mythology sounds absolutely incredible and so interesting, and yet, it is given no regard by society at large. However, there is a complete dovetailing of how he is employed  to recount a part of his modern day tale of the white hat wearing ‘good guys’, by a woman who embodies that exact proclivities ascribed to Ethel, and the re-telling of myths since story telling began.

At its heart, ‘The Vixen’ is about the re-framing of truth, the way that women are portrayed as men are excused their actions in a patriarchal society, and the way that privilege is disseminated from the top down to create the status quo to which everyone must aspire. Failure is not optional, only the best is acceptable and the parts we play is this narrative either reflect the truth or they do not, there is no such acceptance of bias in this manner of social control.

There was only thing I did not like about this book, and that is that it ended. I spent so many hours happily ensconced in its pages , as well as reading myself down a rabbit hole about the House Un American Committee, the communist witch hunts and so forth. This is an author whose works I intend to track down and indulge myself in !

About the author…

Francine Prose is the author of twenty works of fiction. Her novel ‘A Changed Man’ won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and ‘Blue Angel’ was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed ‘Anne Frank:The Book, The Life, The Afterflife’, and the New York Times bestseller ‘Reading Like A Writer’.

The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Her most recent book is ‘Lovers At The Chameleon Club,Paris 1932’. She lives in New York City

Twitter @ProseFrancine @RandomTTours @