Word: jong
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...haired beauty doesn't really dig sexual freedom. On about page 250, we begin to lose track of the number of times Fanny has allowed herself to be raped, humiliated, used, and tortured. Not that our heroine doesn't get turned on once or twice; in fact, one message Jong seems to want to convey is that the once-innocent and always good-intentioned Fanny eventually breathes easily with her sexuality--enough, supposedly, to chronicle the sordid trysts for her daughter, the aforementioned Belinda (not surprisingly, Jong dedicates Fanny to her own daughter). And Jong does hit at some sort...
...theory that there's some sort of vague socially redeeming value or at least some source of moral relief in that thought, Jong brings us Fanny, seven years after Isadora--the woman who admitted she was flattered when her lover felt at ease farting in her presence--slept her way to stardom in Fear of Flying. Some will hail Fanny as a reflection of Jong's maturation as a writer. In a sense, that analysis is correct--if Isadora was raunchy, then Fanny Hackabout-Jones is downright base...
Fanny is an even trashier novel than Flying or How to Save Your Own Life (1977), but that's not the most annoying thing about it. With Fanny, Jong backdates her heroine, capitalizing every other word in a futile attempt to satisfy on a literary level. Acclaiming her creation as a "mock-eighteenth-century novel," Jong writes the 490-odd-page story from Fanny's perspective in a brand of English that defies historical classification...
...purports to dignify outrage. That any woman should allow herself to be raped by her stepfather, humiliated by the homosexual lover of the man she herself loves, and abused by a gang of perverted female whores is hardly forgivable, let alone heroic or commendable. Add to this the confusion Jong creates by eventually granting Fanny her converted, no-longer-gay man and by indicting such distinguished writers as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift as Fanny's not-so-distinguished lovers. The result is a novel that, in self-consciously trying to infuse a message into vulgarity by shocking and disturbing...
...THIS wouldn't matter so much if Fanny contained an intriguing plot or at least a reasonably interesting story line. But Jong doesn't seem to have time for these details. The message, the message. The book's jacket characterizes the insides as "highly entertaining" and "wildly funny"; could that refer to the page-and-a-half roster of eighteenth-century synonyms for "vagina"? Or maybe you consider reading about 12 men who gang-rape an innocent victim wildly funny...