28
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Friday, December 7, 1984
BOOKS
A NEW APPROACH TO POETRY
"ADVENTURES IN POETIC PROSE"
Singing the crazy salad blues
BY MAURICE CROLL, M.D.
BY JOSEPH COHEN
Special to The Jewish News
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"It's certain that fine women
eat a crazy salad with their meat,"
Yeats said in one of his most often
quoted lines, and Erica Jong in
Parachutes and Kisses (New
American Library) is out to prove
it with a vengeance.
In this latest installment of the
thrilling adventures of Isadora
White Stollerman Wing Ace,
aging Jewish Princess, our
erstwhile heroine of Fear of Fly-
ing and How To Save Your Own
Life is up to her neck in her old
tricks, sampling the masculine
goodies of the Western world. The
only person Isadora hasn't run
into yet is Nathan Zuckerman of
Philip Roth's The Anatomy Les-
son, but it is only a matter of time
since they are both in the same
business. Monkey business. It's
very funny; it's very grim.
This is a book for savaging, but
the hatchet job will have to be
done by somebody else. There's
plenty that's disconcerting here:
the idea that more is better
whether it's sex, booze or drugs, as
if they are all that counts, that
Prince Charming is ever off-stage
awaiting his cue, that Little Red
Riding Hood can dally in the for-
est as long as she wants to without
having to fear the wolf.
It seems to me that the message
in all those massages in Fear of
Flying was precisely that you
couldn't play in the woods and get
away with it. And Isadora ap-
peared to confirm that message in
How To Save Your Own Life. But
here she is, ten years older, now
39, a little sadder but no wiser,
racing out to the forest with her
foot pushing the accelerator to the
floor while the master brake cy-
linder is cracked and leaking
badly.
Isadora tells us that the
women's liberation movement
has earned for women "the right
to be eternally exhausted." Now,
it looks like Jong is determined to
earn that right for all of her
readers, too. It's tiring, listening
to her sing the crazy salad blues.
If you can tolerate the endless
descriptions of acrobatic coupl-
ings, this novel does have some
substantial saving graces.
Though the sexual excesses are
writ large, the literary ones are
writ small. Jong pays too much
homage to Roth and Updike: the
epigraphs to each chapter are
overwhelming and not always
that appropriate; a very long
poem, though a nice one, is
printed twice — all these things
should have been addressed by
her editor.
On the other hand, the literary
allusions range far and wide and
enrich our reading enormously
both in their obviousness and
their subtlety. Though not a
well-disciplined writer, Jong is a
first-rate stylist, and her reflec-
tions on the craft of writing and on
the relative merits of the life of art
versus the art of life are filled with
that particular kind of seminal,
yes, seminal, wisdom which comes
so easily and naturally to women
but rarely to men.
As a writer, the genie in her
genius is her strength in para-
graphing. She is a master of
close-knit vibrancy. As a para-
grapher she is superb, and, at her
Erica Jong
best, unequalled, displaying a
skill undoubtedly honed by her
experience as a poet.
I have long maintained that
Fear of Flying was and is a land-
mark work, not only because it
mirrored accurately the condition
of women in America in the late
1960s, but for other substantial
reasons as well. How To Save
Your Own Life was a disappoint-
ing sequel. Parachutes and Kisses
is an improvement over it but not
as good a novel as Fear of Flying.
Like this first book, it displays
some of the same flashes of insight
into the human condition, and
when they occur they explode in
the consciousness like Joycean
epiphanies. The accuracy is still
there.
For example, Jong was the first
writer to make us aware inFear of
Flying that Jewish American
Princesses carried their heavy
burden of royalty into chronologi-
cal maturity. This characteriza-
tion of the older JAP is further
developed in Parachutes and Kis-
ses. Isadora is pushing 40, but
judging from her values you
would never know it. Hers is a
case of arrested adolescence
masked by her assuming the role
of an arbiter of taste and a woman
of experience.
Sophisticates may be into the
advocacy and pursuit of designer
clothes, correct wines, European
jaunts and expensive perfumes,
but they don't describe them as
"luscious" and "scrumptious."
Isadora does.
By contrast, Ruth Puttermes-
ser, the only other child-woman
we've had to acknowledge re-
cently, is far more resourceful.
This protagonist in Cynthia
Ozick's "Xanthippe and Putter-
messer" in Levitation: Five Fic-
tions (1982) resolves her problems
of powerlessness and disintegra-
tion not by promiscuity, alcohol
and smoking dope but by creating
a female golem who helps her to
become mayor of New York. How-
ever, Ozick is not a writer Jong is
likely to emulate. Apparently, she
doesn't even like her.
When Isadora travels to Russia
to attend a literary conference she
is accompanied by a number of
other writers one of whom is
named Clarissa Cornfeld (corn-
fed?). Isadora - provocatively de-