My original 1973 copy of this Erica Jong book has a picture of a plane in the sky, rows of city dwellings that connect, red hearts, a couple of gray, naked (but with fig leaves) boys, a blonde, blue-eyed baby angel, a sliver of a map of Manhattan, a red clock with Roman numerals and a train going through a countryside. It's a far more interesting cover than the subsequent one shown here that implies that the author only titillates her readers mercilessly with "paroxysms of passion," as the main character Isadora Wing's high school nerd friend would have put it.

Remember, this was written in the early seventies of America. Truly it's more about a Manhattan woman's rebellious confession that she has these fantasies of "zipless fu-ks" than about her actually finding the so-called perfect man who "completes" her. (I've never had either problem, hating both the idea of sex with strangers and the desire for a man to complete me. That insipid Tom Cruise movie of a few years ago where he seduces a woman with "you...complete...me" made me howl in pain.) She has a fear of being on her own without a man, which parallels her fear of flying, but she decides to be brave and try to find herself (or her truth) by jetting to Vienna with her second husband Bennet to attend a psychiatrists' convention. The psychiatrist Bennet hopes it'll help straighten her out because she won't listen to him.

Isadora, you see, doesn't know what she wants: freedom or stability. Theirs is a lonely marriage punctuated with good sex where Isadora fantasizes she's with someone else and it makes her feel extremely guilty. She's Jewish and blames a lot of her emotional problems on that. At the convention she finally meets her "zipless fu-k," Adrian Goodlove, a married, but flirtatious psychiatrist from London, and immediately makes him her first affair. Riddled with guilt, she can?t help falling apart and drooling over him.

So What Happens Already??

Bennet sees what is going on between the two and said it proves his point that she is looking for her father since Adrian was blonde and blue-eyed like Isadora-and Erica Jong-were and supposedly her father was. He is probably right because she falls in love with Adrian when he shows himself not to be a stud (or her perfect man), yet he doesn't care about his performance. What he does care about is upsetting her safe, boring life and roaming Europe by car for a month with her. After days of agonizing over his invitation, she impulsively leaves her husband to go with Adrian.

The Englishman (Bennet was Chinese) declares that the future would not be discussed, but only the past, and so Isadora, faced with a willing listener and no deadline (she assumes), regales him with the tumultuous history of her first husband who became convinced he was Christ and ended up in a loony bin after trying to kill her for betraying him, her screwed-up family of three sisters and a dramatic mother, and her transition affairs before she met Bennet. After pouring out her life to Adrian, he gets drunk one last time with her and then reveals his need to meet his wife and family the next day.

Betrayed and abandoned Isadora is forced to figure out what to do with her life and why she left Bennet and why Adrian has skipped out. She doesn't know where Bennet is or if she even wants him if she did know. I won't spoil the final message of Fear of Flying, though, by giving away the ending, but only say that it "completely" made the book. I don't mean it the way Cruise did, either!

My Many Comments

At one point Jong has her anti-heroine Isadora ask her readers if they really thought everything she was saying was the truth, but this story seems so real that I honestly thought as I was reading it that Erica Jong had changed her name from Isadora. I usually become bored with novels, but these 336 pages were no problem for me at all. Maybe I'm just as fascinated with the quirks of men as she is and find them challenging to understand. Maybe I'm also a writer who seeks inspiration from life experiences.

And maybe I'm afraid of the unknown experience of writing a play and need the courage to face it as Isadora faced her fear. Yes, okay, I'm guilty. No maybe about it!

Being able to relate to Isadora's issues, however, did not alone engage me with Jong's anthem to freedom.

The flowing words describing her every thought, memory and feeling is what captivated me throughout. It's not some smutty gossip she offers like a prize, begging the reader to see how beautiful and deserving she is. No, her style is more like a psychiatrist's patient exploding with all the confusion, hunger, sarcasm and reflection on life that's been bottled up within her. She wasn't afraid to admit she had fantasies or to look stupid and laugh at herself through the pain, such as when she started her period and had no Tampax or pads. Adrian had just quit the scene and so, alone in a cheap Paris room, she fashions a kind of diaper from a shirt of Bennet's she had and one pin. Wearing a bathrobe and squeezing her legs together to hold the diaper up, she goes in search of toilet paper.

Her cut-up remarks of fat psychiatrists were memorable as well:

When the food was brought out, herds of analysts in formal dress mooed and grunted towards the tables.

They're already being served cake in the next room, said a two-hundred pound beauty in a canary-yellow satin pants suit, twinkling with rhinestones. All up and down the tables, you could see nothing but long arms clawing at food with silver serving forks.

Throughout this astonishing performance, the schmaltzy violins played on their balconied perch above the main ballroom pp 137

I honestly think a man could be amused by this book as much as a woman, but whether he would be able to comprehend her neurotic mind and what a struggle it was for her to be her own person, I don't know. I surely would love for men to try at least. Even though Isadora is a bird of the early seventies in search of open sky, the communication battle between the sexes still rages on and Fear of Flying will encourage lots of discussion still today as it did then.

One word of warning to Germans, Arabs, mothers of many children, psychiatrists maybe and people who hate sexual slang: you may not appreciate some of her comments or language. That's what makes a character breathe, though, when she's not always sweet and agreeable, but earthy and honest. I think you'll find much more to love about Isadora and all Jong's characters than to dislike. Like me you'll be hard put to stop reading 'til the end.



Recommended: Yes