For many followers of history, among the most grievous miscarriages of justice perpetrated by the U.S. government were the 1953 executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage. Such grim subject matter would seem an inauspicious backdrop for a literary caper, yet Francine Prose nimbly employs the Rosenbergs' fate to launch The Vixen, an often funny escapade revolving around a fictional New York publishing house at Red Scare-mad midcentury.
A few months after the Rosenbergs are executed, Simon Putnam, a Jewish, Brooklyn-bred recent Harvard graduate whose impractically twee major was Folklore and Mythology, begins a job as a junior assistant editor at Landry, Landry and Bartlett, a publishing house whose literary bona fides mitigate its financial precariousness. Simon has been winnowing the publisher's slush pile for six months when he's finally given a real assignment: he must pretty up for publication a debut novel called The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic, a potboiler based on the Rosenberg case; it's intended to make enough money to get Landry, Landry and Bartlett out of hock.
Simon is aghast at the prospect of having a hand in the novel's publication, and not just because it's a piece of propaganda designed to convince readers of the Rosenbergs' guilt: if Simon's parents knew what he was working on, they would be devastated, particularly his mother, who grew up in the same Lower East Side tenement as Ethel Rosenberg. And yet Simon understands that challenging his boss would be career suicide: "I'd been admitted, on a trial basis, to a charmed circle of angels... and I feared being cast back into the outer darkness of Coney Island." Complicating matters is Anya Partridge, the book's author, a photo of whom has the effect on Simon that her novel's protagonist, Esther Rosenstein--"a sexpot Mata Hari," as he puts it--has on the men in her path.
Simon's fondness for folklore--he recalls folktales throughout the novel, which he narrates as an older man--plays as a wink at The Vixen's allegorical underpinnings: like a fable, the story is animated by the tug-of-war between principle and personal ambition. Prose (Blue Angel; My New American Life; Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932) has crafted an inspired work of fiction that, while staying within a realistic framework, does for an invented New York publishing house what Ira Levin did for a certain Manhattan apartment building in Rosemary's Baby. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Humor and dodgy behavior drive this crafty historical novel about a New York publishing house's effort to capitalize on the 1953 executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.