She....wore....blue....oops, wrong story

So last year, I read Francine Prose's A Changed Man, and I wasn't all that crazy about it. Since then, I've read some of her reviews and essays, which I've generally found interesting and stimulating. I've liked them, really. Liked them enough to think maybe my reaction to her novel--I mean, not her one novel, it was actually her fourteenth, give or take?--was just a fluke thing. So, now, I've read her previous novel Blue Angel, because I think I'd heard once or ten times or howevermuch that it was better than A Changed Man and it got stuck in my head and I felt like I needed to give it a shot. So I've given it that shot, and, I guess though I still see some of the elements of her prose style that bothered me so much in A Changed Man in this book, those moments generally bothered me less in Blue Angel. For whatever reason. (Though they still did bother me, now and then. There's a certain earnestness, now and then. Like, a blatantness to the way some things are stated. And I get nervous even saying that because I worry that's where the "satire" in her novels is, and I'm just actually totally missing it. I worry a lot about this. That I'm just not getting the joke.) And overall, I think I'd want to say that I enjoyed the novel, if it weren't for the fact that I spent most of it having strong, very strong, reactions to everything Swenson, the main character, did. Or failed to do. For very long stretches of the book, all I could think was, "My God! Swenson! You fucking asshole!" And then now and then I'd find myself downshifting to think, "Aw, jeez, Swenson. You dumbass." And though there was a bit--maybe a page or two--near the climax of the book where I sort of found myself pitying him, it really didn't last, because, jeez, Swenson...what an asshole. And there you have it, the core of my feeling about this book: Francine Prose did an awesome job of making me hate the hell out of her main character. Like, clenching-my-teeth levels of hate. I'm not sure if this is the reaction she intended for me to have.