She’s beautiful. She’s sexual. She’s highly intelligent. She’s loud, brash, and egocentric. She’s Isadora Wing and she’s thoroughly confused. Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying takes us into the life and mind of a woman during an existential crisis. She has most of the things that a woman is supposed to have for happiness, but the story begs the question of whose standards are being used to judge what a woman wants or needs.
As the novel starts, Isadora is attending a Freudian psychoanalytic conference in Vienna with her Chinese-American husband Bennett. On the first day, she gets groped by an attendee named Adrian Goodlove.
Isadora is pursuing her fantasy of getting a “zipless fuck”, quick and easy sex with maximum satisfaction and no strings attached. Her husband Bennett is a therapist, cold and distant and a little bit dull. Isadora loves him but feels unfulfilled. Ironically, he is good in bed and yet she seeks out sexual trysts to fill the emptiness that permeates her life. While Bennett is loyal to mainstream Freudian thought, Adrian is hooked on the wilder theories of the anarchist psychology of R.D. Laing. Isadora is in the middle of a battle between Apollo and Dionysus and for the time being she’s taking sides with Dionysus.
Adrian doesn’t turn out to be a zipless fuck though. He probes her mind, getting into the recesses of her memories and emotions. He’s bad in bed, possibly even a closet homosexual, and he patronizes, sometimes possibly abuses Isadora psychologically. As terrible as he is at fucking her body, he has a certain knack for fucking with Isadora’s head. Without understanding why, she submits to him completely and they run off on a car trip around Europe, leaving her husband Bennett behind. Along the way, she recounts the story of her life and Adrian looks for patterns. In the end, Adrian abandons Isadora. She hits rock bottom and that is when her great epiphany comes, pushing her towards the growth and personal freedom that she has always needed.
Before reaching the end of the novel, the narrative appears sloppy and formless. By the end of the book, everything clicks into place and the scheme of the story makes sense. The story is bracketed by two “zipless fuck” sequences, one in which Isadora remembers a movie scene in which a random soldier on a train seduces and abandons a widow in mourning. At the other end, Isadora almost gets raped on a train by a conducter, making her wake up to the fact that a zipless fuck is not what she truly wants. Sexual promiscuity is, for her, a way of hiding from what she truly wants. Her personal story builds as she relays her autobiography with details about her childhood and family, her sexual liaisons, and her relationships with men. In three sequential chapters, she tells about her first husband, who becomes schizophrenic, her next lover, who is a socially awkward musician failing in his career, and her sister’s creepy husband who tries to seduce her while she visits the family in Lebanon. This sequence involving three men is important because it shows how her refusal to sleep with her sister’s husband is the first time when she refuses to submit to the desires of a man. Other parts of the story that feed into this theme of submission involve the useless therapy sessions with male analysts and their generic, textbook answers to her problems that solve nothing, and a scene where she tells her college professor in her Master’s English literature program that she wants to quit college. He reprimands her sharply and that is why she earns her living by teaching college English while working on a Ph.D. in literary criticism even though she hates it. By the end, the pattern becomes obvious: Isadora feels unfulfilled because she never decides for herself what she wants; she only pursues what men tell her is best for her. Once you see this pattern, it is easy to predict where Isadora will end up. The formlessness of the writing suddenly becomes a revealed form. And Adrian turns out to be more than a sexually impotent jerk. He fulfills the same narrative function that the talking animals in Grimm’s fairy tales fulfill; he tells her what she needs to hear and leads her towards her destiny. Like the children in Grimm’s fairy tales, she realizes full maturity when she takes control over her situation by herself without the help of anyone else.
What Jong does with the narrative almost doesn’t work. The narrative shifts between past and present can be frustrating and often seem like random splotches of unrelated information. The pacing is jerky, alternating between slow drips and smooth flows. Three-quarters of the way through the book I wondered if this random jumble of stuff would add up to anything. But in the end, everything falls into place and it all makes sense. Life is sloppy and you could say that this is reflected in Jong’s prose. You could also say it is amateurish writing. I prefer the former, not the latter, but I do not lean strongly in that direction.
Fear of Flying is probably of more historic importance than literary merit. It came out in a time when women did not have the independence or freedom that they take for granted now. It brought Second Wave feminism into the mainstream. A lot of housewives and working women wanted more from life but were too afraid to say so for fear of backlash from society. Erica Jong gave them a voice and helped them take the next step in social evolution. As important as all this is, I would still argue that it does have literary merit. It is insightful and introspective, and Isadora’s mind is exposed on full display for analysis like few other female literary characters that came previously. Where Simon de Beauvois dissected all aspects of the female sex like a cold study of an animal species, Erica Jong humanized these ideas by putting them into the life of a literary character. If you are patient and willing to look outside the confines of your present existence, this is a work of quality.
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