How to Save Your Own Life By Erica Jong Holt, 310 pp., $8.95 I’m treed; it irks me no end. I have to—have to—ravage Erica Jong’s new book. Irksome, because this is just what Erica wanted all along: the barracuda treatment. I mean, a man and a Gentile blitzing her: oh, pogromsville and joy. Despite the hitter-chick sex, Fear of Flying was cute as baton-twirlers: likable, humorous, adroit. Erica expected suffering and outrage and at least one honorary FBI tap; instead she got whacking great success. Life is cruel. She’ll relish this flop the way A1 Goldstein secretly relishes going to Leavenworth for public lewdness. Discipline is love; American society has been too permissive. Erica, I love you: How to Save Your Own Life is Christ-awful. An aphid could have written it.
What we get here is Erica Jong writing a “novel” about Isadora Wing, who has written a “novel” about Candida Wong, who is really her: let that pronoun refer back where it will. “Millions of copies later, I began to wonder whether I had created Erica or whether she had, in fact, created me.” And, would you believe, Erica-Isadora-Candida are still unloading their hapless Chinese husband, Wing-Wong-Jong, whom they (all-together-now) leave for a young hippie. More shameful anti-Sino atrocities haven’t been committed since the Japanese invaded Manchuria. This is gratuitous and shabby stuff. If I were Mr. Jong I would have decked her long ago, or gotten out a Tong contract.
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