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Ian "Marvin" Graye's Reviews > Fear of Flying
Fear of Flying
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Ian "Marvin" Graye's review
bookshelves: to-read, a-wish-liszt, miller-nin-jong, aaa-to-re-read, aaa-to-re-read-soon, re-read
Oct 10, 2014
bookshelves: to-read, a-wish-liszt, miller-nin-jong, aaa-to-re-read, aaa-to-re-read-soon, re-read
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Reading Progress
October 10, 2014
– Shelved as:
to-read
October 10, 2014
– Shelved
October 10, 2014
– Shelved as:
a-wish-liszt
October 10, 2014
– Shelved as:
miller-nin-jong
October 10, 2014
– Shelved as:
aaa-to-re-read
October 10, 2014
– Shelved as:
aaa-to-re-read-soon
October 10, 2014
– Shelved as:
re-read
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http://www.ericajong.com/flying.htmhttp://www.ericajong.com/pressroom.htm
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, writer and critic at Stanford University, [cited] the joyful exuberance of Jong’s lead character—evading death, embracing sex—as one of the novel’s lasting contributions to feminist literature. “[Isidora] was a bawdy, Rabelasian female subject,” Fiskin noted.
At a time when female writers were all but nonexistent on university syllabi, she says, Fear of Flying initiated a genre emphasizing earthiness, candor, and honesty, resolutely rejecting the double standard that insisted on women’s texts as narratives of sacrifice and destructive self-sacrifice.
http://irwgs.columbia.edu/files/irwag...
"I thought I was writing a mock memoir, à la Moll Flanders or Robinson Crusoe. I never thought anyone would take it literally, especially a member of my very intelligent family.” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/200...
"Erica Jong’s first novel, “Fear of Flying,” feels like a winner. It has class and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her soufflé rises with a poet’s afflatus. She sprinkles on the four-letter words as if women had invented them; her cheerful sexual frankness brings a new flavor to female prose. Mrs. Jong’s heroine, Isadora Wing, surveying the “shy, shrinking, schizoid” array of women writers in English, asks, “Where was the female Chaucer?,” and the Wife of Bath, were she young and gorgeous, neurotic and Jewish, urban and contemporary, might have written like this. “Fear of Flying” not only stands as a notably luxuriant and glowing bloom in the sometimes thistly garden of “raised” feminine consciousness but belongs to, and hilariously extends, the tradition of “Catcher in the Rye” and “Portnoy’s Complaint”—that of the New York voice on the couch, the smart kid’s lament."
December 17, 1973
"When he [John Updike] wrote his famous review of FEAR OF FLYING (collected in PICKED UP PIECES), I was amazed and delighted. Not only was his review readable and amusing, but though not without quibbles, it was sunny. I had by then read so many niggling attacks on my supposed love of pornography (which I hate), that I was cheered by his sunny assumption that sexuality was merely human. He also assumed that women were just as human as men. Later, he was attacked for his affable approach by curmudgeonly, bitter Alfred Kazin who implied that Updike was merely making a pass. Many writers do this, but John Updike was not one of them. Actually it was Kazin who was the flirtatious misogynist, not Updike.
"John Updike strove mightily to understand, rather than dismiss, feminism--unlike Alfred Kazin, Paul Theroux, Martin Amis and all the little criticules (many female as well as male) who followed in their tortured footsteps.
"I can think of no writer who was as open to difference as John Updike. He wanted to understand women and in many of his books he achieved this near-impossibility. If we compare him to Bellow or Roth or Mailer, we see how very open-minded he was."
Erica Jong
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/erica-j...