Review by New York Times Review
IN ERICA JONG'S "Fear of Flying," published 42 years ago, Isadora Wing invented the notion of "zipless" sex, that is to say, no-strings sex with a near stranger. Thus Jong presented millions of women readers with the possibility of - the great joys of - agency in place of soporific and joyless passivity in life and, of course, sex. Isadora nudges her way onto the sidelines of Jong's latest novel, not coincidentally titled "Fear of Dying." On display is the author's characteristic mix of salty language and broad humor, warmth and truth-telling. "Fear of Dying" is the coming-of-age story of a 60-year-old woman named Vanessa Wonderman, a friend and confidante of Isadora Wing. The novel traces one year in Vanessa's life. Her elderly parents have been in the protracted process of dying, causing her to meditate on the myriad indignities of old age as well as her own fear of mortality. "Do we hold on to our parents, or are we holding on to our status as children who are immune from death?" Vanessa wonders. Some of her older friends and relatives have died. She also mourns the loss of her youth (part of which was spent in a Riverside Drive penthouse once owned by George Gershwin), as well as her career as an actress: "There were no interesting jobs for me, so I quit. I refused to play the mother, then the grandmother, then the crazy old hag." Vanessa is married to an older man. "My husband and I," she confesses, "read the obituaries together more often than we have sex." To remedy this situation, Vanessa submits an ad to a website called Zipless.com, whose creators have "ripped off" Isadora. And soon she's flirting with candidates for potential liaisons, including a man who insists she wear a black rubber suit and another who offers to be her personal slave. Both Zipless.com and Isadora - who appears infrequently, for the most part dispensing quippy advice and then disappearing - are superfluous, perhaps brought in to draw more readers or to leaven a book that's primarily about aging and death. jong isn't the first author to revisit a signature character with questionable results. More interesting than Vanessa's friendship with Isadora is her pleasingly complicated relationship with her daughter, Glinda, who's a much richer character. Vanessa's coming-of-age as a mother - learning, for example, that "half of motherhood is shutting up" - is described with hard-won poignancy. After Vanessa's husband collapses and undergoes open-heart surgery, she nurses him at home and, in doing so, engages in a somewhat predictable examination of the good that remains in her life, despite her mounting losses. She does, after all, seem eager to make the best of things: Even before she turned 60, she'd gotten a face-lift. ("I considered plastic surgery as mandatory as leg waxing.") Throughout "Fear of Dying," however, Vanessa's narration is disjointed. Tender, smart passages that ponder the meaning of growing old and the pain of aging in a culture that largely ignores its older women are interspersed with disappointing shtick about Zipless.com or circumcision or shopping. We hope for more from Vanessa than this: "There's almost nothing a new dress can't solve. Until the bill comes." HEIDI PITLOR is the author of two novels, "The Birthdays" and "The Daylight Marriage," and the series editor of "The Best American Short Stories."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 6, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Fear of Flying (1973), Jong's sexually candid first novel starring the intrepid Isadora Wing, rocked the zeitgeist. Two dozen books later, Jong presents a new erotically forthright and slyly philosophical novel about an irreverent sexpot New Yorker struggling to adjust to turning 60 while caring for her beloved aging poodle, seriously ailing parents, and older billionaire husband (her fourth) turned cardiac patient. An actor most famous for her role as a soap-opera villainess, Vanessa, the second of three sisters, is assailed by memories of her effervescent theater family (King Lear jokes are rampant), while her daughter, an actor and rehab alum, is about to have a baby. Relying on her best friend, writer Isadora Wing, for perspective, Vanessa has a face lift, seeks hot sex online, lavishes love on the dying, and issues barbed observations about everything from the sea of lunacy that is the Internet to the potentially world-improving power of grandmothers. Flashy, flip, and hilarious as well as smart and wise, Vanessa ruminates on the mysteries and absurdities of life and death and asks, Why is it so hard to be a human being? Jong has created such an extraordinarily direct and intimate narrative voice, one almost forgets that this bravura performance is a work of fiction. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Jong is a beacon for several generations of readers, and her first novel in more than a decade will garner much excitement as it's launched with a major national marketing campaign.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
More than 40 years after the publication of the cultural touchstone Fear of Flying, Jong delivers a not-quite sequel-an exploration of the emotional and sexual consciousness of Vanessa Wonderman, an actress who threw herself into the role of wife of the kind, wealthy, 20-years-older Asher when Vanessa's "acting career had gone to that place women's acting careers used to go when they neared fifty." Now sandwiched between ailing parents and a pregnant daughter, and unwilling to "retreat into serene sexlessness," Vanessa is "just unhinged enough" to place an Internet ad looking for someone to "come celebrate Eros one afternoon per week." So what makes this a sequel? The website where she posted the ad is Zipless.com, the name ripped off from her best friend Isadora Wing, who coined the term zipless to describe a certain kind of one-night encounter in the original Fear Of book. (Fear of Fifty, a memoir, was released in 1994.) With Isadora, Jong ushered in a bold new way for women to talk about their sex lives and their desire to pursue pleasure for its own sake. It's canny of Jong to tie this story back to Isadora's original quest for something like sexual fulfillment-and Isadora pops up in this story to act as a wizened guide. Unfortunately, it's Vanessa who narrates this story, and while readers may be amused by Jong's trademark humor, which reads like catching up with a very chatty and revealing friend, Vanessa as a character is too self-absorbed to provoke any feeling other than relief when it's over. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME Entertainment. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Jong's first novel since Sappho's Leap (2003). As a young woman, Vanessa Wonderman was a successful stage actress. She even had a midlife run as the villain on a nighttime soap opera. When she married a billionaire 20 years her senior, she recognized that she was choosing love and comfort over adventure. But now her parents are dying and her husband's had a heart attack and she's reconsidering the choices she's made. As the title suggests, this novel is a bookend to Jong's scandalous debut. Isadora Wing, the protagonist from Fear of Flying, reappearsolder and wiseras Vanessa's best friend. Desperate to feel vital in the midst of decay and death, Vanessa places a personals ad on zipless.com (another reference, of course, to Jong's first novel). What follows is the heroine reflecting on her slightly wild past and her mildly terrifying present as she auditions potential lovers who range from the disappointing to the alarming. All of this is promising, but spending almost 300 pages with Vanessa is like enduring a trans-Atlantic flight with a seatmate who never stops talking but doesn't have a whole lot to say. Vanessa's greatest weaknessas a narrator, definitely, and possibly as a personis her truly spectacular self-absorption. She drifts off into observation on topics like war and the Internet and female circumcision without recognizing that she has nothing new to say on any of them. Worst of all, though, is the fact that the culture seems to have outpaced Jong when it comes to sex. Vanessa wonders at the fact that she and Isadora are able to speak candidly of SM; neither Vanessa nor her author seems to know that this is now the stuff of prime-time TV. Jong does have interestingeven arrestingthings to say about age and dying. They're just hard to find in this overlong and self-satisfied novel. Not without its moments. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
