Fear of Flying was the first time I encountered adult life and wasn’t bored

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/06/fear-of-flying-erica-jong-books-that-changed-me

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When I was 13 I went on holiday to Mallorca with my family, and halfway through the trip ran out of books to read. I had by then been reading what I thought of as grownup novels for years, but they were mostly historical: Jane Eyre, which seemed more like a children’s book, with its orphanage, ghosts and frilly white nighties; the enthrallingly cartoonish Gone With The Wind; and, of course, any Jackie Collins I could lay my hands on.

After reading right down to the Mrs Pepperpot Omnibus, I looked for something – anything – that wasn’t my dad’s History of Hill Walking. Luckily, in a suitcase, I found a novel of my mother’s with a bright yellow jacket. John Updike, whoever he was, was quoted on the cover: “The most uninhibited, delicious, erotic novel a woman ever wrote,” blah blah blah. If it wasn’t in Lucky, or Chances, it wasn’t an erotic experience worth writing about. Also – and I don’t think I’m backwards-projecting here – there was something creepy about Updike’s use of the word “woman” in that sentence; and “delicious”, and “uninhibited”.

And this was before you got to his extended blurb on the inside jacket: “Fear of Flying stands as a notably luxuriant and glowing bloom in the sometimes thistly garden of ‘raised’ feminine consciousness.” Why did he sound like he was rubbing his hands down the front of his trousers?

Anyway, I started to read: “There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh.” There followed 10 pages describing the narrator’s failing marriage, her sexual fantasies, her fear of flying, including the line about never trusting a pilot with a New York accent, and many jokes about the uselessness of psychoanalysis that practically blew my bowl haircut clean off my head. The only flights I’d ever been on were flown by pilots who sounded as if they came from Guildford. But I took the point, and it struck me as brilliant. I had no real idea about psychoanalysis either – it would be another 10 years before we even got sushi in Aylesbury – but it sounded like the most glamorous and sophisticated thing in the world. And then there were the rude bits.

Although Fear of Flying was written in 1973, two years before I was born, the tone of the book was demotic and feverish, almost journal-like, and written in a way that seemed incredibly modern. It was the first time I’d read about adult relations and not been bored witless. Sex in a Jackie Collins novel was designed only to titillate, but here it was wrapped up in relationships, influenced by the pressures and prejudices of the outside world and the long-range damage of the narrator’s childhood. In other words, it rang true. And the novel seemed terribly erudite. In what would now, perhaps, read like protesting too much, Erica Jong mitigated the hurried, chatty style and pop subject matter with references to Blake, Byron, Dostoyevsky and other pillars of her graduate degree.

The main thing, however, is that it was very funny. I probably missed two-thirds of the references, but the tone – that flat, sardonic edge that made everything seem like a hilarious in-joke – was applied to things I thought you couldn’t joke about. For example, 30 years after the end of the second world war, Jong wrote about the emotional fallout among American Jews whose parents had lived through it.

The rudeness wasn’t just in the sex, either; she is unbelievably rude about the Germans. I also loved the way she started sentences with “and”, as well as using slang and other things we’d been taught were capital crimes against good taste and grammar. This was my first encounter with a way of writing that was simultaneously posh and not posh.

Updike, in the more sensible bits of his critique, compared this to Portnoy’s Complaint, but it also had roots in The Adventures of Augie March and – as the author herself liked to point out – in the picaresque novels of the 18th century.

Much later, I found out that Fear of Flying was a classic novel of second-wave feminism, which is to say it was derided by lots of first-wavers as trivial, solipsistic and too sex-oriented to be considered truly political. None of this concerned me. The writing was furiously good. It had a desperate edge to it, and the force of something that needed to be written. I still remember the final line of the first chapter, which I thought hit exactly the right note between pretentious, pleading, self-dramatising and self-knowing. It was the perfect layup for the novel that followed: “Consider this tapestry, my life.”

There is a coda to this story, which is that a few years later I was wandering through the book department of Selfridges, in London, and Jong was there signing copies of her memoir, Fear of Fifty. It was a salutary lesson in the vagaries of publishing: Fear of Flying sold an estimated 20 million copies worldwide – and here she was, completely ignored.

A few days later, a long interview with her by Zoë Heller ran in the Independent on Sunday, and I remember bits of it as vividly as I do the novel: her “gorgeous froggy eyes”, her terrible poetry, her suspicion of Heller’s “unsisterly meanness”. I was shocked that someone I revered could be treated this way. And then I read the memoir, and saw that the journalist was right. People who are good don’t always stay good; they are destined to be butchered by those coming up behind them. The follow-up novels to Fear of Flying – How To Save Your Own Life and Parachutes & Kisses – were mostly flabby and lame.

But nothing reduces the impact of that first summer read, a moment in time when the world seemed bigger all of a sudden, and vastly more amusing.