In a 1995 New York Times article, author Francine Prose described a campus committee meeting to consider the dismissal of her friend, an acclaimed poet and tenured creative-writing professor named Stephen Dobyns, who had been accused of sexual harassment. Prose was rankled by "the civility and high moral seriousness" that set the tone for the proceedings, a neo-Victorian inquiry she likened to a "badly overacted student production of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible." While she admits that Dobyns misbehaved (though not seriously), Prose attacked the smug hypocrisy of his colleagues and wondered how such harassment policies might erode free speech on college campuses. Her indignation gives a compulsive charge to Blue Angel, a bold and provocative satire that plays out a similar scenario in all its excruciating detail. The title comes from Josef von Sternberg's silent classic about an uptight middle-aged schoolteacher who's helplessly seduced by cabaret singer Marlene Dietrich; at the end, he's debased into playing a slobbering clown. So goes the inexorable journey of Ted Swenson, a weak-willed creative-writing professor at a private liberal-arts school in Vermont, where a new strain of sexual Puritanism has given rise to such courses as "Text Studies In Gender Warfare" and "Batterers and Battered." As the story opens, Swenson is a happily married and successful novelist, suffering only the vague humiliation of not having published in 10 years and the weekly chore of giving gentle pointers to would-be authors who lack the faintest sliver of ability; he compares his most successful workshop to "healing the terminally ill with minor cosmetic surgery." He's stirred from his lethargy by Angela Argos, a scrawny, genuinely talented punk outcast who teases him, Dietrich-like, with chapters from her work in progress, leading him into an affair with dubious motives and harsh consequences. With horrifying momentum, Blue Angel follows his descent step by excruciating step, as the self-conscious Swenson recognizes his mistakes but can't keep himself from making them anyway. Once his private humiliations are carted out to the clucking tongues of university officials, the book falls prey to didacticism, but Prose nevertheless presents a damning case study on political correctness. Passionate and often savagely funny, Blue Angel finds Salem reborn on the quaint grounds of America's universities.