Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 2, 1994 TAG: 9408180021
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CAROLE GOLDBERG THE HARTFORD COURANT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Well, OK, maybe two articles.
The famously naughty Erica Jong, she of the picaresque novel, the many marriages and the zipless you-know-what, celebrates turning 50 with this memoir.
Jong, who lives in Weston, Conn., has written six novels, the best-known being the best-selling ``Fear of Flying,'' that oh-so-'70s paean to spontaneous sexual combustion. Published in 1973, the book has sold more than 12 million copies in 27 languages. She's also an accomplished poet and essayist.
``Fear of Fifty'' is an amalgam of Jong's thoughts on feminism, aging, sex, motherhood, Jewishness, marriage and the rigors of writing for a living.
These are interspersed with her account of growing up in a creative, neurotic, fascinating New York City family before going on to a series of creative, neurotic relationships of her own.
Her family is a hothouse of emotional angst - peopled by women who wanted to be artists but were marooned by motherhood; a father who wanted to be a show-biz star but wound up selling giftware; an overbearing grandfather; a self-sacrificing grandmother; a demented lesbian aunt; and sisters who compete rather than comfort. That makes it, of course, an excellent incubator for a young writer.
Jong uses them - and her four husbands and her daughter - as exemplars of victors and victims in the war between men and women, and women and women.
Unfortunately, she keeps interrupting the personal stories, which make her philosophical points quite compellingly by themselves, to interject long passages of commentary on sexual politics. Both the family narrative and the essays on women's conflicted roles in American society would have been stronger as separate pieces.
Jong also gives us, in exhausting detail, accounts of her many love affairs, right down to the quality of the orgasms. This is material endlessly fascinating to her, but some readers may wish that on this subject, she had chosen to keep it zipped.
Although inflated with more air than a quart of cheap ice cream, the book has many tasty nuggets. Among them:
The whiplash generation.
Jong coins a memorable term here, describing women of her generation who have been made dizzy by the successive upsurges, backlashes, advances and retrenchments of feminism in America.
Mothers and daughters.
Their age-old conflict comes from a shared, contradictory desire for daughters to be just like their mothers, yet at the same time to acknowledge and grow beyond their mothers' limitations. I am the ground from which you push off, she tells her daughter, Molly.
Women and solitude.
One of the unexpected bonuses of reaching their 50s for many women is realizing that being alone can be a calming, refreshing and fulfilling experience.
Good girls and bad boys.
Why do good women fall for bad men? Afraid to break the rules themselves, Jong says, they live out their fantasies of rebellion through relationships with men who have no such scruples.
Why there are so many Jewish writers.
Not, Jong says, because they are ``people of the book,'' or come from homes where reading is revered, but because by writing, they can define their class, re-invent themselves and create pedigrees - an obsession with identity central to quintessential outsiders whose very survival depends upon it.
Why some Jewish men reject Jewish women.
Jong says it might be because of a lifelong resentment of their mothers for standing by and allowing them to be circumcised, thereby forever wounding them in their very manhood. Perhaps, but here Jong may be making a mountain out of a molehill.
These insights and many others are provocative and worth discussing. But some readers will weary of plowing through Jong's lists of lovers and pontifications about the meaning of life to get to them.
Early in the book, Jong relates a piece of advice culled from her father's vaudeville days: ``Never follow a dog act,'' meaning little kids and cute animals will upstage you every time.
Too bad he never impressed on her another valuable bit of show-biz wisdom: ``Always leave them wanting more.''
by CNB