Maybe Jong feels inclined to reclaim her character from being unjustly portrayed as a literary bimbo, but readers could have been allowed to do that for themselves without such bossy direction of their feelings and as a feminist gesture it’s undermined somewhat by the fact that all the other women Vanessa encounters are awful vapid bores.Īlso a bit distasteful is the focus upon terribly rich people and their terribly rich problems. If Fear of Flying was, in part, effective and moving because of the unstinting frankness with which Jong regarded her fictional self, the praise she heaps on Isadora here (“She has gone from being a wild girl to a wise woman… She has become the most spiritual woman I know”) feels trite and narcissistic.

Exchanges between her and Vanessa feel like Jong talking to and about herself. The website on which Vanessa seeks extra-marital encounters is called Zipless, in tribute to Isadora’s historic pursuit of the effortless, uncomplicated, no-strings-attached “zipless fuck”.ĭisappointingly for those Fear of Flying fans who still feel a powerful connection to Isadora Wing, she resurfaces here without much definition. The novel also features, as Vanessa’s best friend, Jong’s most famous fictional avatar, Isadora Wing, protagonist of her 1973 bestseller and cause célèbre Fear of Flying. Vanessa is both a character – a well-known actress and screenwriter attempting to buoy up a happy but sexually inert marriage with online dating – separate from Erica Jong and a mouthpiece for Jong’s own bouncy observations about loss, sex, feminism, parent- and grandparenthood, fame and romance. “I’m nearly an orphan.” The line captures not only Vanessa’s own self-confessed immaturity, and her awed trepidation about a world not containing her beloved parents, but also a sense that dawns on many of us as we age: that there is no magic key to a kingdom called adulthood in which decisions make sense and uncertainties dissolve that we will always feel little inside.

“I’m a grown-up,” insists Vanessa Wonderman, the 60-year-old protagonist of Erica Jong’s ninth novel.

Fear of flying erica jong review