[DeMott is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, educator, and critic. Following is his mixed review of Any Woman's Blues.]

Leila Sand, the heroine of Erica Jong's [Any Woman's Blues], is a mid-fortyish, compulsively fornicating artist and celebrity who, despite occasional moments of satisfaction in the natural world or in bed, is almost continuously woebegone. She's gripped by a sadomasochistic obsession (object: an obnoxiously faithless young hustler named Darton Venable Donegal IV), her muse is deserting her and her studio is in chaos. What's more, her children (twin daughters) don't need her, and wine and weed keep punching her out.

Leila fights the blues hard, to be sure, and her struggle—waged mainly in her Connecticut country house, in SoHo and in hotels and palazzi in Venice—becomes the substance of Any Woman's Blues. Guided by her writer pal Emmie, Leila tries Alcoholics Anonymous (and provides convincing glimpses of the comic candor and heartbreak of A.A. meetings, as well as of their democratic fellowship and quasi-religious intensity). She also battles her addiction to Dart Donegal, eventually managing to lock him out for good. And, late in the book, there's a hint of oncoming redemption through the religion of art. At one point Leila "is in a state of grace. She wants to skip, to kneel before the Madonna, to invent drawings and paintings that will communicate joy to the joyless, faith to the unbeliever, and love to the loveless. She wants everyone to savor and celebrate life because it is a feast. It is there for the taking. You have only to open your mouth, open your hand, love one another, thank God, and rejoice."

But at the end, as at the beginning, Leila's prospects inspire only wary hope. A.A. has helped, but she hasn't really kicked her habits. The young hustler is gone, but he's followed by an equally unpromising passion, a Venetian Casanova. (The pair make out on gondola rides.) Defeat sounds often in her voice: "All my life," she says, with her story winding down, "I've wanted nothing but to bring sex and friendship together—and I seem to be farther from it than ever." And the world she's made her own—overpopulated by corrupt and violent celebrities—seems doom-ridden.

Owing to the heroine's lineage, there's bounty for moralists in Any Woman's Blues. The preface, written by a fictional feminist literary scholar, passes the word that the book is actually the work of the sensationally uninhibited Isadora Wing, the heroine of Ms. Jong's first novel, Fear of Flying, which was published in 1973. (An upbeat afterword by Ms. Wing confirms the attribution.)

With this news come lessons. Famously shameless in four-letter word and deed, Isadora Wing was a creature of sexual delight, huge appetite and no guilt whatever about infidelity and promiscuity. If Leila, the first-person narrator of Any Woman's Blues, is Isadora 17 years later, it follows (for moralists) that sin and abomination don't pay. What happens to a female Portnoy, a supermerry, superraunchy Wife of Bath who never looks back? If she becomes Leila Sand, what happens is that she sometimes finds herself banging her frustrated head on the floor, in a pool of her own blood, wailing in wretched loneliness, no comfort left but prayer. Hedonists, attend.

For readers as opposed to moralists, though, the point about this book isn't that wanton indulgence gets its comeuppance. It's that literary self-indulgence spoils the narrative—and the central character. Isadora Wing, Leila Sand's forebear, was a figure of wit as well as appetite; her lively brain powered Fear of Flying with a current of shrewd, funny observation on men, women, marriage and physicality, male and female. Always she stood at a fine remove from piety and self-pity. Isadora as Leila, on the other hand, has lost several steps. She stamps and weeps and tries to "thank God for the lichen, for the raspberries, for the clouds" (the phrase "thank you" is repeated a hundred or so consecutive times on a single page). She carries on, now hysterically, now sanctimoniously, but seldom entertainingly.

At moments, Ms. Jong seems aware of the problem. When Leila's hustler tormentor walks out after a cliché-strewn, soap opera-like scene ("'That's it!' screams Dart. 'The last straw!'"), Leila falls to the floor and weeps. Whereupon in marches Isadora Wing, in italics, as follows: "Isadora: Couldn't she weep in a chair for once? Leila: Could you?"

The aim of these and other tart-tongued interruptions is to lighten the proceedings, and once or twice they succeed. An occasional idiom or patch of comic invention elsewhere calls up Ms. Jong's earlier achievements. There's a "punky adorable midget" designer named "Mij Nehoc (Jim Cohen spelled backward)," and also some well-judged flame-throwing at Manhattan vanities. ("She's the charity disease queen of New York—a hotly coveted title.") Some of the chapter epigraphs, moreover—from blues lyrics by Bessie Smith, Ida Cox and others, including Piano Red ("You got the right string, baby, but the wrong yo-yo")—will make any responsible person laugh out loud.

But as a whole, Any Woman's Blues feels leaden. What's missing is what won the author of Fear of Flying a place among the true and unforgettable headliners of late-20th-century literary vaudeville: gorgeous, saving sass.

Benjamin DeMott, "The Fruits of Sin," in The New York Times Book Review, January 28, 1990, p. 13.