About that crocodile:
I have to say that I thought it a perfect ending. Not that it was necessarily good, mind you. Rather, I thought its clumsiness encapsulated TC’s dramaqueeniness (not to mention her occasionally curious taste) and it proved an effective device to resolve the Blakey thread and Professor thread simultaneously. It definitely put a button on a lot of things for me. And TC does build subtly to it as a resolution throughout the book, so I’m not sure it’s a hailmary-finale.

The “crocodile coda” is the key (if a little heavy-handed.)

I thought that was the worst part of the whole thing. After fuckjillions of words that were so fucking subtle and witty and just lulled you gently into Castle’s head, the crocodile shit was a fucking bludgeon.

I have never written a book, but I wonder if this is what happens when you are just too exhausted to finish a book properly, and you kind of phone it in, relying on hackneyed crap. I had this feeling about Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent novel (I forget what the fucking thing was called). It was really good, with lots of surprising and dramatic shit, and then in the final part of the book the two protagonists have HOT SEX! and then realize WE CAN NEVER BE TOGETHER! and GO BACK TO THEIR SEPARATE LIVES! Bleahh.

I’m sure Castle is correct that she was willing prey–and it’s important to the narrative structure of her story that she’s not “just” a victim of treachery. But this relates to larger questions of women’s agency and how feminism today is unwilling to say “false consciousness” any more. (There’s a parallel issue with agency in the historical profession, I would say.) That is, whatever a woman does is supposed to be “feminist” simply by virtue of a woman having made a decision for herself. So (for example), women a generation younger than me and who are not sex workers go to college parties, dance around stripper poles, and lift up their shirts because a group of men shout “show us your tits!” (My students have told me about parties like this that they have attended.) See, it’s liberation because these women are doing what they want to do! And it’s considered impolite to ask where they got these ideas, and why they’re behaving like sex workers only without getting paid.

It’s become politically unfashionable to admit that anyone’s a victim, so we all walk around telling ourselves that we chose our victimization so it’s OK.

But I also think that astonishing crocodile coda is the key to understanding what makes “The Professor” so compelling a piece, and somewhat distinct from the rest of the book (though perhaps closest connected to the Pepper piece). In “The Professor,” for me at least, we hear a really complicated account of what it’s like to meet a predator and to become that predator’s willing prey. It’s not that the relationship could have destroyed Castle, but that it came very close to destroying everything about Castle that Castle (at the time) believed herself to be. And penultimate MLA encounter combined with the crocodile coda reminds us that, as much as Castle may eschew aspects of her past self, she remains just that tiny bit susceptible to the confident predator’s thrall. (I’m reminded here, too, of Castle’s luxurious account of her disastrous encounter with the scholarship adjudicator.)