Putnam’s job is to make the leering, dementedly right-wing book (whose “excerpts” are one of the memorable joys of Prose’s novel) into an international best seller for Landry, Landry, etc., which suffers financially as a dedicated publisher of highbrow stuff - just as true in the 1950s as today, evidently. He is hired by the fancy publishers, despite (and, it turns out, in part because of) his Jewishness and despite (and, it turns out, in part because of) his inexperience as an editor, to improve the “style” and the sentences of the terrible book, which the publisher knows is terrible. The hero, Simon Putnam, is a very Francine Prose protagonist: smart guy, in love with a good sentence, disappointed in himself for excellent reasons and barely understanding what he’s doing, tripping over cobblestone after cobblestone of ambition (very big), conscience (smallish and late-blooming), desires of all kinds and uncomfortable self-awareness. (The privilege is not gone by, mind you, but the accompanying peacocking and those gentlemanly publishing houses are not much in fashion now.) This dreadful, arch, offensive piece of garbage is to be published by the silky, goyish, three-martini-lunch publishing house of Landry, Landry and Bartlett, a place described in loving, caustic detail to help the modern reader envision a publishing world gone by: haute WASP and male, enamored with its own privilege and celebrating it publicly and privately. dropped around her.” Her Jane Russell body and unchecked libido drive men (including an all-American, anti-Communist attorney) mad with desire. And (AND!) Esther/Ethel is a femme fatale, with “ample, shapely breasts,” the “notoriously buxom and beautiful Mata Hari who’d almost slithered through the dragnet the F.B.I. “The Vixen” is the title of Prose’s new novel, and “The Vixen, the Patriot and the Fanatic” is the title of the hilariously awful novel within her novel: a potboiling, bodice-ripping story about (hold on to your shirtwaists and fedoras) the Rosenbergs, who in this version are very, very guilty enemies of the state, named Esther and Junius Rosenstein. If there were a George Bernard Shaw Prize for Crisp Compassion and Amused Disappointment in the Species, Prose would have won it many times over, for searingly clever novels including “ Blue Angel” (man ruins life - thoroughly and all by himself - for an ambitious girl) and “ Guided Tours of Hell” (hapless writer envies and maybe kills his nemesis, an irresistible Holocaust raconteur).

No one states problems more correctly, more astutely, more amusingly and more uncomfortably than Francine Prose. “The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly,” Anton Chekhov wrote.

The vixen francine prose