Bang a Jong (Get It On)

Alright, so I just finished reading Erica Jong's seminal Fear of Flying, inspired by hearing her speak recently. I read it once eons ago and considered it a firmly raised middle finger to moral stodginess and a spirited celebration of freedom. This time, while still regarding the sexual and emotional candor as laudable and the Isadora Wing's contradictory impulses well-examined, I found that the actual prose and dialogue became increasingly more frustrating as I read. All the gobs of literary allusions come across like unabashed namedropping - as though Jong is eager to impress us with an inventory of her bookshelves. There must be an average of at least one literary reference per page, and Isadora gets awfully smug when a character doesn't catch one of her referential quips. Not to mention the dollops of self-righteousness where the narrator gets to tell off the assorted pompous characters who engulf her on her journeys. Jong repeatedly sets up straw men in order to knock them down and the whole thing reeks of a rigged fight. Example: the snooty bastard with the docile wife on the train who starts a conversation with Isadora about the collapse of standards in education for no other purpose than to get his feathers ruffled when she vehemently disagrees with him. The scene is conveniently placed in the story to occur exactly when she has set off on her own and needs to prove her newfound independence. It feels staged and I don't buy it.

Another gripe - far too much ink is wasted on her continuing struggle to write. There are few things more tedious than listening to a writer lament about not being able to write. I have very little patience with writers writing about writers writing, or such as in this case, writers not writing. That approach is very limiting in scope and smacks of self-importance - the tortured artist syndrome which is mostly of interest only to fellow tortured artists. It seems like a relatively recent phenomenon. To my knowledge, authors prior to the twentieth century rarely made writers their central characters (Knut Hamsun's Hunger being a singular exception) they just wrote about people.

It's easy to imagine how Fear of Flying burst onto the scene in 1973, kicking down doors which had long screamed for kicking down. And that aspect of the novel is still very potent and reason enough to keep it alive. Isadora Wing is at her best when being brutally honest with herself and at her worst when trying to convince us of how clever she is. It sounds strange to say it, but I think she suffers from having read too much during her formative years. Balance is a healthy thing. Once in a while you really should just put down the book and go outside to skip some stones.