![]() 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. ![]()
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