FEAR OF FLYING

Erica Jong who has written poetry has written a novel about a young woman named Isadora Zelda who also writes poetry and is one of those Isadora-Zelda-Marjorie Morningstars who become neurotic Jewish-American-Princesses or prom queens full of not only their mother's aspirations as well as their own fears (flying, or just being alone) or guilts (random sex; the boy she married and left in a California institution) as well as her various Half-Lives and other subdivisions. If it is only between her feminine mystique and her female hygiene -- and anyone who can refer to a diaphragm as a yarmulke will instantly make the latter less troublesome. Then of course there's the major reconciliation between her writing (which takes her ""to the unknown worlds within my head"") and wifehood -- she's now on her second attempt with a psychiatrist en route to Europe with 117 other analysts with ""longish hair and tentative beards."" Bennett is Freudian, sombre and penitential although he comes on more strongly in the sack while her new love, a Laingian, proves to be as ""limp as a water-logged noodle"" and in the end, worse, abandons her altogether. The terrain is familiar but Miss Jong is a funny writer and look out for those insets on anything from European facilities to The New Yorker. A wayward, wicked entertainment of one of those chafed spirits so very much of our time.