With 'The Vixen,' Francine Prose adds one more layer: The potboiler being edited by her respectable protagonist is actually part of a nefarious plot. We too live in an urgent time, when necessity as well as conscience dictates that cultural maps must be redrawn or destroyed.Some authors want to have it both ways: Write a potboiler, but frame it as a respectable 'literary' novel about someone writing a potboiler. Through the hapless Simon, for whom the subway ride from middle-class, Jewish, Coney Island to the WASP redoubts of Manhattan is a journey without maps, she gives urgency to serious ethical questions. Prose succeeds in something more difficult than it may appear. It also takes a very good writer to write the hilariously bad novel-within-a-novel that portrays the maternal, purse-carrying Ethel Rosenberg as a sexual predator. Hence our nervous laughter in the face of Mad Men and its ilk. There may be fewer of us every year who consider being 'handsy' as the boss’s prerogative, but the durable hold of an entrenched and partially hidden political establishment on cultural power, as well as intimate life, is tangibly still with us. And yet, we keep laughing, not because it doesn’t matter, but because it rings so true. Prose neatly wraps this dirty secret of American publishing into Simon’s own trajectory, as he starts to realize that there are wheels within wheels in the production and promotion of the ill-conceived Rosenberg bestseller. But it is the knife-edge of familiarity that gives The Vixen’s retro setting its comic sting.

This is all-too-recognizable and not the stuff of comedy. a dark comedy, an antic farce that works on several levels at once. Or, in Ethel’s case, for typing them up for her brother. Prose deftly reminds us of a chapter from nearly 70 years ago, during the Red Menace hysteria, when the government could jail and kill a couple for passing on secrets to the Soviets. This novel also comes at a perfect time in American history, as hard-won voting rights are being suppressed and the fabric of democracy itself torn apart. Francine Prose’s higher purpose as a novelist is fully realized in this delicious coming-of-age story in which everyone is afraid, anyone can be accused, and disinformation runs rampant. the underlying heartbeat of The Vixen isn’t political so much as literary-a book within a book that keeps the narrative thrumming. And yet, this is also a book steeped in the warmth of Jewish family life, post–World War II.

It is a testament to Prose’s mastery as a storyteller that what emerges is a penetrating look at the underside of comedy-namely, how the human condition can be so predictably cruel and paranoid. The most surprising thing about The Vixen.is how laugh-aloud funny it is.

The vixen francine prose