CAUGHT IN A MORAL DILEMMA
The Vixen turns Cold War paranoia into smart comedy, filled with sexual escapades
Depending on the light, Francine Prose's latest, The Vixen is 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.
The story begins with dread on Coney Island. It's June 19, 1953, and the TV is playing I Love Lucy interrupted with updates on the imminent execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The narrator, Simon, is sitting with his parents in their dark apartment. Years ago, Simon's mother grew up in the same tenement building as Ethel Rosenberg. For Simon's family, the Rosenbergs' conviction on espionage charges is another frightening example of American anti-Semitism. Although Simon recently graduated from college — majoring in folklore and mythology — he still feels suspended between adolescence and adulthood. But it's his first office job that becomes the centre of this curious novel about a young man trying to do the right thing. Simon is hired as a junior editor at Landry, Landry and Bartlett, a prestigious New York publishing house. One of the firm's founders gives him a secret assignment: He must edit an outrageously erotic spy novel called The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic, inspired by the life of Ethel Rosenberg.
Charged with making the Ethel Rosenberg thriller “less bad,” Simon confronts passages like this doozy:
“The prosecutor sensed her presence from all the way down the corridor, overpowering the usual prison smells — disinfectant, sweat — with the crazed perfume of estrous animal passion.”
You can practically hear Prose guffawing over these excerpts; they provide a wonderful excuse for this superb stylist to dress up like a literary tramp. The editorin-chief is convinced they can exploit the Rosenbergs' execution to make a bestseller and earn enough money to save the publishing house.
It turns out that the debut author of this “steamy bodice-ripper” is Anya Partridge, who always wears a fox stole. She's a wealthy young woman temporarily consigned to a mental institution. Despite Anya's ghastly prose, Simon can't resist her, and soon they're engaged in sexual escapades all over New York, including one particularly exciting tryst in Coney Island's Terror Tomb.
Ultimately, The Vixen is about guilt and innocence, but not that of the Rosenbergs. Simon — so righteous, so horny — is caught in the thighs of a moral dilemma: He's got to prove his patriotism and help save the publishing house, but he's convinced Anya's manuscript is an act of slander against Ethel. How can he revise “this three-hundred-page crime against truth” without betraying his mother's childhood friend?
As Simon wrestles with the complexity of this challenge, he begins to plumb the depth of his own naiveties and complicity. “I was learning how desire can make you unrecognizable to yourself. My life seemed to me to have been built upon a series of lies.”