Word: isadora
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Jong's bestseller is the mock memoirs of a 29-year-old Jewish poet named Isadora Wing who accompanies her husband, a psychoanalyst, to a conference in Vienna. There Isadora links up with another analyst, a sardonic weasel of a man named Adrian Goodlove, and takes off with him on a raunchy, drunken odyssey across Europe. Along the way, Isadora manages to unburden to Adrian and the reader an abundant mélange of sexual escapades and dreams, the most memorable of which is her hunger for anonymous sex with nameless...
...outgrown them. "The beautiful men on the street are probably very boring to talk to." Jong grew up in a Jewish household in Manhattan, attended Barnard College and earned a master's degree in English literature from Columbia. Both Jong and Isadora are poets; both had brief marriages to fellow students, then married American-born Chinese psychiatrists. Most of the novel, says Jong, is "an interweaving of fiction with reality...
...book has surprised no one more than Jong, who considered it too "literary" for wide appeal. But literary it is not. Poorly constructed, too prone to phrases like "our mouths melted like liquid," it has a shapeless, self-indulgent plot and weak characterizations, especially of the men. But Isadora obviously has wide appeal. Says her creator: "Fear of Flying is a litmus test for everybody's mishegoss [Yiddish for craziness]." Warren Farrell, a spokesman for the men's liberation movement, feels that Fear of Flying will help free both sexes. As women take more initiative and responsibility...
Many feminists, however, find Isadora's obsession with men a confirmation of the worst stereotypes about women. Sandra Hochman, author of Walking Papers, admires Jong's frankness but complains that Isadora is "just another female loser, left in the end to choose between one creep and another." Becky Gould, newly elected president of the National Organization for Women in Los Angeles, objects to the fact that Jong's heroine "derives her identity through her relationships with men. She is prefeminist, confusing libidinal bluntness with liberation." Gould concedes, however, that Jong has helped make headway for women writers...
Youth's silent rebellion in Let the Wind Carry Me, the juxtaposition of innocence and experience in Both Sides Now, and the suburban frustrations of The Arrangement are messages from a modern Isadora whose life is a litmus for the innocent and imaginative. "Joni exorcises her demons by writing those songs," says Guitarist Stephen Stills, "and in so doing she reaches way down and grabs the essence of something very private and personal to women...