Word: leila
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...novel, Any Woman's Blues, Erica Jong has at last created a heroine even she couldn't love. Leila Sand is blond, randy and famous -- as a painter of "vaginal art." She is fortyish but still, she keeps assuring us, attractive: "I don't look worse than a 22-year-old -- to some men I look better." And like all Jong alter egos, she is looking for love in all the wrong places. The result is the bitter lament of a successful woman sexually obsessed with a much younger man. Leila keeps citing Colette and Cheri, but Cher comes more...
When she catches her lover Darton Venable Donegal IV with another woman at a chic restaurant, Leila first notices he is at a "bad table," then sneers at his girlfriend's cheap perfume ("Charlie!") and inelegant neighborhood ("Hoboken!"). After her ten-year-old daughter confides that Darton, who likes rough sex, has spanked her, Leila is outraged, then forgets to do anything about...
...Leila is fond of exalted similes. "My heart blazes like Shelley's on that beach" (her boyfriend is back); "I wander in like Theseus into the Labyrinth" (she's in the wine cellar); "We lie together, Pan and Ceres, the god of the woods and the goddess of grain" (afterglow). Half the novel is about her ill-fated passion; the rest is her resume. Leila did the '60s ("I produced happenings with Yoko Ono") and civil rights ("Mississippi with Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney"). She sounds a little like the pathological liar on Saturday Night Live: Yeah, that...
Jong writes the book with three different names. Caryl Fleishmann-Stanger writes the forward. Isadora Wing, the heroine of Jong's most famous novel Fear of Flying, writes the story itself and is given to recording, in the middle of narrative text, arbitrary conversations with Leila Sand, the novel's protagonist...