Word: isadora
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...book is pitched to the public mood. And it ought to be a hit, not just with the faddists of feminism; there is plenty of stuff for feminists too, not new stuff, not all of it the right stuff, but stuff. At the center of the story Isadora Wing asks the question, "What does it mean to be a woman?," and only pirouettes round the problem. She hedges over whether to be or not to be liberated, zigzaging the issue until she finally aborts her own liberation. It's a real yoyo story...
...Isadora Wing, like Erica Jong, is a Jewish middle class New York poet. She's got mangy blond hair and an ass, sexy to some, that gives a waddle to her walk. She's also got a kooky vulnerability that comes off like a Streisand stage performance. Her first marriage annulled when her husband freaked out in a Messianic frenzy, she remarried a psychoanalyst and was herself analyzed a few times over. And after more married life Isadora Wing has had it with monogamy. Monogamy simply didn't turn out to be the golden dream the American commercials--body soap...
...Isadora evolves the fantasy of the "zipless fuck" to deal with the problem. The zipless fuck is the platonic ideal in the newest sense of the word: you meet a strange male, your clothes fall off like flower petals, you come together in one soulbending mindbodyfuck, faceless, nameless, no ties, no commitments. It is to be a Last Tango, quick and compressed like a dream. (Erica Jong likes the bigger than life words, the exaggerated scene. Life for her people is one big high. If she doesn't dream big, she doesn't dream--when she dreams about getting laid...
...watch. Isadora, Bennet her husband, and Adrian Goodlove, a Laingian from England, get involved in an adulterous whirlwing in Vienna. Bennet--Freudian, careful, compulsively clean, straight, steadfast--represents Isadora's panic about being alone and about change. Adrian--Laingian, irresponsible, egotistical, clown, ass grabber--represents her hunger for the heady and exuberant in life. Isadora tries to choose between them, juggling security with Bennet against escape with Adrian, The National Book Award and the Transatlantic Ass Award. She sleeps with Bennet dreaming of Adrian and sleeps with Adrian needing Bennet. She doesn't want what she has, and when...
...Isadora finally summons the guts to run off on an existential experiment with Adrian, which she fails, and royally. "I realize more than ever how unliberated I am. All my high-fallutin' rebelliousness is only a reaction to my deep-down servility." Adrian disappointed her in love, while she had, knowing better, placed a magical efficacy in the word. She hightails it back to monogamy and files him away in her note-book, readying herself for work once again. And here's the key. Having made a mess of her life, only through her work can she piece it back...