Word: jong
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ERICA JONG...
...Erica Jong writes not so much novels as almost breathlessly up-to-date confessional bulletins. When last seen in Fear of Flying, Jong (who calls herself Isadora Wing on paper) was soaping up in her psychiatrist-husband's bathtub, waiting rather ambiguously for him to return and forgive her for the 340-page sexual excursion that made up the novel...
...time, leaving the doctor to his patients and as Isadora says, "his hatred of women." Writes the heroine: "I was on the lam, an exile from a bad marriage, a wandering Jewess; a lifelong New Yorker heading Wes ... I was off to meet a lover and my destiny." In Jong's wall-poster philosophy, today is the first day of the rest of your life...
...academic hauteur (she says she was "amanuensis to the Zeitgeist") through Cosmo cute ("Bed reared its ugly headboard") to bewilderingly lifeless porn. The author's mind seems to have been softened by too many hours in a Malibu Jacuzzi. As if searching for a new definition of vulgarity, Jong writes that hostile criticism of her first novel makes her think of "Jews gassed at Auschwitz." (Actually, Fear of Flying was extravagantly overpraised.) She also contrives to turn the tragic suicide of Poet Anne Sexton (named "Jeannie" in the book) into a kind of posthumous blurb for herself...
...heroine is forever masturbating. Sex is often joyless or, when it is good, it sounds like 42nd Street: "Hot . . . hard . . . dripping . . . throbbing." At one point, Isadora complains: "While the whole world is f- away behind closed doors, all I do is write, write, write." Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Ms. Jong...