THE JONG AND THE RESTLESS
Vincent, Norah
THE JONG AND THE RESTLESS Erica Flies Again By Norah Vincent Don't let the pretentious, Freudian title fool you. Erica Jong's What Do Women Want? isn't a manifesto. It's not even much of a...
...On the avant-garde: "Something new in literature is often gloriously oblivious to old rules of decorum, old limits of literary expression...
...Hillary Clinton has alienated much of the American public because she has an abrasive personality and because she manifests unfounded intellectual and moral contempt for most people she meets, especially those with whom she disagrees...
...reveals its worn-out and past-it author in the endless name-dropping and back-patting that fill Jong's pages...
...Jong does concede that what she labels an attitude of "f— you" characterized Mrs...
...That feminism's patron saint of the pot-boiler was so deluded about her own importance when she published Fear of Flying in 1973 is sad but perhaps intelligible...
...On Viagra: "The Viagra craze shows, if nothing else, that American men want their erections back...
...Speak the words "Hillary Rodham Clinton," and any feminist worth the title will immediately intone that the first lady is unpopular because Americans are threatened by a strong woman...
...He always made a great point of how literary I was...
...Non-fiction only brings out her worst insecurities...
...If they drown, they are innocent...
...On art: "All of us, if we are honest, know that art is a fart in the face of God...
...The truly awe-inspiring thing about What Do Women Want...
...Of course, Jong doesn't go on to concede that such an attitude doesn't win many friends except, perhaps, in the cattle-futures market...
...Then again, maybe the "f " word is out of fashion because feminism in the hands of people like Jong has become so predictable...
...is its author's utter conviction of her own wisdom, self-possession, and exemplary good taste—her cogency, intellect, and depth...
...Then I lost it...
...Clinton just stand around in her writing like awkward guests at a cocktail party...
...Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,' said Henry Kissinger...
...Since my first novel did foment a sort of revolution in consciousness, I was able to nurse, for a time, the delusion that the word did change the world...
...Without the redeeming layer of artifice that even shallow novels afford, Jong's pedestrian opinions on pornography, sex, men, motherhood, and Mrs...
...In my time," she modestly reminds us, "I have hung out with plenty of contemporary icons: Nobel laureates, rock stars more famous than Jesus, movie idols who can't walk unmolested in the streets, politicians in and out of high office...
...The latest foray into non-fiction by the author of the bestselling 1973 novel Fear of Flying is petty egotism and self-congratulation masquerading as cultural criticism...
...It gets, if possible, more embarrassing when Jong likens herself to a genuine novelist like Vladimir Nabokov: The "literary blessing" that Graham Greene conferred upon Nabokov's Lolita, she humbly tells us, is just like the one "John Updike and Henry Miller were later to confer upon Fear of Flying...
...Now I have come to trust the word again— though in a more modest way...
...It's not even much of a polemic...
...The self-delivered accolades continue throughout the book: "As a professional writer whose process of composition often resembles Twain's, . . . I think I understand Twain's creative strategy...
...As Jong piously writes: For it is true that when we wish women to fail, we decree for them endless and impossible ordeals like those devised for witches by their inquisitors...
...Jong should have stuck to the highbrow bodice-rippers with which she first brought herself to public notice...
...She's right that she was deluded about her own importance way back when, but she's deluded as well about her modesty now...
...On Bill Clinton: "When we are confused by the current political scene, we ought to look to the animal kingdom for guidance...
...Consider these opinings: On Lady Diana: "She probably was a dear girl (why should I doubt it...
...Wrapped up in the conceit that her own decline and fall is history's decline and fall, Jong misses that the "f" word is out of fashion primarily because it was a fad—fabricated by fatuous frumps, flakes, and floozies whom the next generation of women fled like poison...
...you already know what it's going to say...
...This narcissistic dwelling on her place in history is the sure mark of the has-been—a perfect preface to a vaunting, useless book...
...She finds it admirable, in fact...
...Jong's puerile invocation of a witch hunt is typical of the way her prose matches her mind, invariably reaching for the most hackneyed explanation possible...
...Henry Miller makes several appearances in What Do Women Want?, always as an occasion for flattering Jong: "He was coaxed by a friend into reading Fear of Flying, and he responded with a torrent of applause, enthusiasm, and unpaid agentry...
...It's painful to watch...
...and she was more empathetic than the usual Sloane Ranger...
...How can anything espoused by their mothers be either radical or real...
...One wishes she hadn't left out Ethel Rosenberg, if only for completeness...
...if they float, they are guilty...
...Even more than in these exhausted, old confusions, What Do Women Want...
...Twain couldn't have written a better parody of Erica Jong than Erica Jong has unwittingly written of herself...
...Clinton from the start...
...On Adrian Lyne's recently broadcast refilming of Lolita, in which symbolic bananas and ejaculating soda fountains blight almost every scene: "It is a restrained, understated piece of work...
...There may be a smidgen of unintended truth in this last claim...
...You don't need to read this book...
...That she is still so deluded is merely sad: The aging Erica Jong is living proof of why feminism is out of fashion...
...On the first page of What Do Women Want?, Jong announces, Norah Vincent is a freelance writer living in New York City...
...And so do American women...
...On the very next page, for example, Jong declares: "If the 'f' word, feminism, is out of fashion today, that's because it's associated with the seventies—the mythic decade of our daughters' births...
...And he wasn't even as cute as Bill Clinton...
...This has pretty much been the way America has tried to get rid of its cleverest political women, from Victoria Woodhull and Emma Goldman to Eleanor Roosevelt and Geraldine Ferraro...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 6
