Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

It has taken me more than 30 years to pick up this classic novel of feminist liberation from the '70s, but I'm very glad I did. I was entranced by the skills of author Erica Jong from the very opening lines, "There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh." The rest of the book is just as clever, and intriguing, as that opening salvo. Jong's storytelling abilities and use of poetic language are amazing. There is no such thing as being bored by this book or this author, whose narrative barrels along like a salacious express train across Europe.

The narrator Jong creates here - Isadora Wing - is captivatingly brilliant. She throws out phrases about obscure art movies ("Last Year at Marienbad") in one breath, and classic Greek sculpture (Oiscobolus) in the next. I dog-eared several pages (which had been dog-eared by some other reader decades before, so thankfully for me I was doing no new damage) just so I could look up other books, movies, sculptures and locations mentioned by this highly educated author. For me, more fascinating even than the story line here is the narrator herself, a mythic creature-whose-life has been rich in knowledge, both classical and physical

, and yet a person set adrift in Europe, troubled by self-doubt and unfulfillable longing. The time Isadora spends both being treated by

-psychoanalysts an dating/marrying them seems to nave left her more confused,

about life and her role in it rather than less. But Isadora's family, while Jewish, has not given her a strong sense of her religion, so she has no touchstone there either.

At its heart this is the story of a woman who leaves her predictable husband Bennett and runs off with a miserable married man named Adrian who has no intention of marrying her, a story which might have been shocking 40 years ago but which is quite pedestrian to us now. And yes, there are still terms in here which some people might think obscene in literature, but life has become a lot more liberal than it was in 1973, and some of Jong's phrases have now become iconic. (Witness the two-word phrase that starts with "zipless.") Still, at its heart, the book, while sexy, is much more than the story of a sexual adventurer. The book is a vignette of the '70s Zeitgeist, a window into the time that set the stage for the moral conventions we have today, thanks to the Pill which more than anything else allowed for the sexual liberation of women. And yet, this book which supposedly celebrates sexual freedom is really a condemnation of Isadora's moral bankruptcy, as she does not gain happiness from her sexual misadventures, but in the end returns to her boring husband and their predictable lives. 

Submitted by Gerti