It’s zip to be Erica Jong,
Erica Jong’s sexy senior sequel to Fear of Flying has a lot less zip than the orginial
In the pursuit of sex — at least, the pursuit of sex mediated through literature — it’s easy to fumble. Writing that aims to tell the truth, or at least a truth, about sex is a tricky undertaking that can so easily turn against the reader and overexpose the writer. Too sentimental, too vulgar: the offerings in front of me make me feel like a slutty Goldilocks, looking for something not too hot or too cold.
But when someone does get it just right, falling right in that coveted triangle of literary satisfaction — the right blend of semantics, emotions and zeitgeist — their work may well become as ubiquitous as sex itself. Erica Jong certainly hit the sweet spot with her 1973 novel, Fear of Flying, which introduced the world to Isadora Wing, a deeply intelligent and neurotic blond, blue-eyed, Jewish 29-year-old woman in full pursuit of what she called “the zipless f--k.” Jong, through her heroine, memorably described the zipless f--k as:
“… more than a f--k. It was a platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover.”
Fear of Flying has sold more than 20 million copies. Everyone (“everyone”) read it, talked about it and wrote about it. Over the short breadth of time depicted in the book, Isadora attends a psychiatric convention with her second husband, has an affair with another conference attendee, Adrian Goodlove, and recounts her life story: the men she’s slept with, dated, or married, more or less in that order. As a book, and a phrase, Fear of Flying drew a hard line between two eras: “before” and “after” the zipless f--k entered our social lexicon. Jong has said she sometimes worries the phrase has become so synonymous with her name it will appear on her tombstone.
But Jong is still very much alive, and this month she releases Fear of Dying, a sequel, kind of. Rather than following up with Isadora at a different phrase of her life, the character widely assumed to be a thinly veiled version of the author, Jong introduces us to a brand new woman: Vanessa Wonderman, a 60-plus actress living in New York. Vanessa, we learn, is Isadora’s best friend. Presumably they met sometime after Fear of Flying finishes with a satisfyingly maddening cliffhanger — Isadora returns to her husband, waiting for him in his hotel room’s bathtub, and the book ends before we find out if they reconcile or not — but those details are glossed over.
Instead, Fear of Dying is a year in the life of our theatrical narrator, Vanessa. She tells us every single thing that happens, as well as every thought that passes through her brain, crammed into a meandering novel divided into chronological seasons. Through fall, winter, spring, and summer she explicitly details the minutiae of her life. Within the first few pages, we learn she is in a loving but sexless marriage (they “read the obituaries more often than [they] have sex”), and she is halfheartedly pursuing her own zipless f--k through a dating website called, yes, “zipless.com.”
The imaginary dating website at the centre of this story is a fascinating device that attempts to put this book squarely in our time. In the Fear of Dying universe, an evil, faceless chain of agents and lawyers have stolen the phrase made famous in a book by Isadora Wing. Thankfully, in this parallel universe, no one has their own take on Ashley Madison or Tinder; instead, zipless.com is described like a hybrid of online dating services such as OkCupid, the popular online dating service, and FetLife, the popular online dating service for people with specific fetishes, by someone who has never used either. Vanessa says she “reached a point where I was just unhinged enough to put an ad on zipless.com,” which includes the line “Come celebrate Eros one afternoon per week.” Immediately after posting the ad she is gripped with fear: “I began fantasizing about what sort of creeps, losers, retreads, extortionists and homicidal maniacs such an ad would attract.” (The worst results she encounters are some dick pics and religious fanatics.)
When she does start meeting men in real life, Vanessa’s adventures on zipless.com are mined for satirical comedy, but the effect falls cruelly flat. The men she meets are designed to be mocked. Through her eyes, we’re supposed to understand that their various predilections are not just perverse, but predatory, dangerous as per her armchair analysis. The first man she meets on zipless. com wants to engage in well-accessorized BD SM play, including a “black rubber suit with zippers over the crotch and the breasts,” and she runs away, upset that “the world is full of crazy people who have learned how to temporarily hide their craziness.” Dismissive, Vanessa thinks to herself that only women who have never read L’Histoire d’O would participate in that, insinuating that women whose desires are different from her own are stupid, or persuaded by “cash and prizes.” Another man asks to be her personal slave, saying it brings him pleasure to wait on women, and she and Isadora laugh in his face. “Don’t make fun of me!” he yells at them, before saying that even if he has a “disease,” they still shouldn’t mock him, and they agree that they should have respected his “illness.”
This is the same kind of Freudian thinking that pervaded Fear of Flying, a book as much about psychiatric theories as it was about sex, where sexual desire is always channelled into a diagnosable sickness. Vanessa prefers tenderness, she tells us, and rejects people who are “so guilty about sex that they want the crime and punishment built in.” There is no universal hierarchy of sexual needs, but here we see Vanessa has established her own, one that puts the orgasm as absolution at the very top. Her desires are pure, other people’s desires are pathological.
As the seasonal interludes suggest, the book is meant to be a calendar: it keeps its own time, allowing Vanessa to take us through her days of caring for two dying parents and a possibly dying husband, while her daughter prepares to give birth to her first grandchild. The bittersweetness of the circle of life might be the intended sentiment of philosophical musings on the nature of death, sex, violence, and love, but Vanessa’s vapid cycling through big ideas only grows increasingly cringeworthy as the book continues. One digression on female circumcision is particularly crass and insensitive: “You think female circumcision is bad?” Vanessa asks us in the passage where her grandson is circumcised. “It’s hideous, health-destroying, and horrible … But at least women have other things to think about than their pussies … Men think about their pricks for the rest of their lives.” Other musings on 9/11 and school shootings are equal in their navel-gazing obliviousness.
Every so often Vanessa indulges in nostalgic reverie, and they are indulgences in the truest sense of the word: stories of previous boyfriends and lovers that are long and drag the reader backward, working against the book’s narrative momentum. Isadora floats in and out of the novel, offering what are supposed to be wise words of guidance but are frequently empty platitudes like “the human heart is a dark, dark forest.” At one point, Vanessa decides to write a play about witches, and the book takes a brief interlude into a script format; it is perplexing and useless, both in terms of story and structure.
In at least one regard, Fear of Dying is a true sequel to Fear of Flying: both books were written with a message in mind. Jong wanted to write a book that spoke to the truth of her experiences and the experiences of other women like her. In the 40th anniversary edition of Flying, she writes the introduction as a letter to her daughter and explains that she truly believed she needed to write this book. Her motivating ethos was “write or die.”
The cruel reality we must all face — in life and in fiction — is that there is no either/or proposition we get to choose from, whether or not we are writers by trade. For Jong and, and for me, we will write, and we will die. With Fear of Dying, Jong has chosen to confront the wrong fear: neither death nor sex are as scary as trying to find the words that describe these two universal destinations.
If sex is anything besides sex, it is an internal clock used to keep time. Our memories fade, either by distance or drink or dissociation, but the hands keep ticking toward those two opposing goals. Sex frequently occurs only in our heads, as memories or fantasies built from the process of acquiring new secrets and perversions. The experience of our own deaths occurs forever as anticipation. Jong’s protagonists struggle to find someone keeping time with them; the mismatches they meet along the way cause what sounds like some very sexually frustrating jet lag.
Likewise, Fear of Dying is keeping its own time, and I couldn’t sync this novel with anything I knew to be true or relatable about sex or death. I was reminded of a recent conversation where I told a friend a secret about my sex life. She was delighted. “You should write about that!” she told me, perhaps as a form of encouragement; I shook my head. “I’m a pervert,” I told her, “not an idiot.”