FANNY: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones

by Erica Jong ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 19, 1980

I'faith--a bawdy bore. Certainly the idea of writing a ""mock-eighteenth-century novel"" from a truly female viewpoint has potential, but Jong (Fear of Flying) goes a-tumbling into both of the great pitfalls that await such a project: her adaptation of 18th-century style and conventions (including those of Fanny Hill) is self-consciously dutiful, with no real voice of its own; and at the same time the book is soaked in anachronisms--especially the stale 1970s-chic platitudes that narrator-heroine Fanny is forced to spout smugly at every opportunity. Fanny is a foundling, of course, growing up in the country house of Lord and Lady Bellars, un-feminine-ly dreaming of ""writing Epicks and mingling with the Beau Monde in Town."" But when she finds her lusty self being toyed with--visitor Alexander Pope gropes, rakish Lord B. deflowers her and brags about it--teenage Fanny is disillusioned and must flee, disguised as a boy. Along the way she joins in with some men-persecuted good witches at Stonehenge, falls into lesbian lust at an inn, is then forced to join a highwayman band led by dashing homosexual Lancelot and his sometime lover, black Horatio (""My Colour will set me apart as long as I shall live and Fanny's Sex shall do the same as long as she shall live""). And, before Fanny can convert Lancelot to heterosexuality or her view of God (""Did you e'er think that He might be a She?""), she winds up in a West End brothel (""are not e'en Wives. . . nought but Whores. . ."")--where her clients include Hogarth, Swift (who's eager to see Fanny copulate with a horse), and Fanny Hill author J. Cleland (who's into transvestite sex). But now Fanny is pregnant, and when a painful self-abortion fails, she resolves to have her babe in style, supported by Lord B. (the babe's pa, whom Fanny has re-lusted with). The labor is difficult, the babe is born, the prose gets worse: ""Who but a Woman can speak of pressing her Cheak to the tender pink Cheak of her own Child and her Breasts running with Milk at its very Touch, squirting fine Streams heavenward like the sprinkled Stars of the Milky Way? Who but a Woman,"" etc. And then baby Belinda is stolen away by a nurse, with Fanny in nautical pursuit. . . leading to shipboard sex (a sadistic, coprophiliac Captain plays ""the Tyrant to cover his Effeminacy""), Caribbean reunion with Lancelot and Horatio (""Don't give me orders, White Man!""), a bisexual foursome with the guys and pirate Anne Bonny, and the expected final revelations about secret paternities and inherited fortunes. So: a hard-working, kitchen-sink-plotted saga indeed-but neither Fanny's character nor the detailed background ever comes alive; the jocular goings-on remain essentially humorless; and the pages and pages of imitation rococo can't disguise the banal ""modern"" sensibility underneath it all. Intermittent pleasure, perhaps, for undiscriminating feminists and fans of ye olde erotica. Otherwise--a long, inanimate exercise that doesn't quite score either as story or tract or literary/historical game.

Pub Date: Aug. 19, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: New American Library

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1980

Categories: FICTION