I adore Francine Prose. Blue Angel is a remarkable account of mutual manipulation within an academic setting--a student and a teacher both use one another sexually and otherwise ... but it's the student who wins (by casting herself as a victim) and the professor who loses (by being dumb enough--or horny enough--to forget that students do tend to hold the trump cards after they've slept with their professors). It was not always thus -- but it sure is now. And that's what Prose examines in Blue Angel, which avoids cheap moralizing (student-teacher sex is bad!) while still exploring how, well, student-teacher sex is really pretty bad. If there is a moral to the story, it's about campus policies that oversimplify such things through binary caricatures of victim and victimizer. Prose does lovely suggestive things with this idea, connecting it, for example, to deep and abiding Puritanical impulses to judge and punish. For Prose, our sex-saturated culture is still a very Puritanical one, and she sees the contemporary campus as one place where that can be lavishly staged. Prose knows whereof she speaks--the inspiration for the novel came from her own experiences watching a campus witch hunt centered on a friend who was accused of sexual harassment. Read Blue Angel if you haven't, and read, too, Prose's essay about watching her friend go through the campus morality wringer.

But that doesn't mean you need to read her latest. I spent the weekend with Goldengrove, Prose's new novel about a thirteen-year-old girl whose world is turned upside down after her sister Margaret drowns. Built around the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem "Spring and Fall (to a young child)," the novel sets out to think about mourning, youth, memory, and poetry -- and it does do all these things. But it does them in a bored and disaffected way. The novel is flat where it should be moving, bland where it ought to surprise, and, in the end, it reads rather like writing it was a slog. The idea is great, many of the plot elements have great potential ... but the spark just wasn't there.

If you don't know the Hopkins poem, by the way, you should. Here it is:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.