[Bryan is an American novelist, editor, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following review, he notes that Parachutes & Kisses lacks plot development and comments that Jong settles for "the self-aggrandizing delusions of a literary Mae West."]

Eleven years ago in Erica Jong's best-selling Fear of Flying, Isadora Wing was 29 and twice married—first to a psychotic Columbia University graduate student and next to Bennett Wing, a Chinese-American Freudian child psychiatrist with whom she fearfully flew to a Psychiatric Congress in Vienna. There she met Adrian Goodlove, a British Laingian psychiatrist who spouted existentialist theory, playfully squeezed her, thought Jewish girls "bloody good in bed" and so mesmerized Isadora that she dumped Bennett in Vienna and took off with Goodlove on a haphazard trans-European motor trip, during which the main hazard turned out to be not Goodlove's losing battles with tumescence but his plan all the while to keep a scheduled appointment with his wife and children in Cherbourg. Isadora, feeling betrayed, winged back to Bennett, let herself into his empty hotel room, climbed into his tub and lay there not certain whether she had returned to soak in the hot water of his bath or their marriage.

In How to Save Your Own Life, Erica Jong's 1977 sequel, Isadora was 32, had divorced Bennett, with his "glum face, his nervous cough, his perpetual analyzing," and was busy dealing with the problems of having written Candida Confesses, an enormously successful novel whose heroine, Isadora confided, "was modelled after myself." The difficulty was "my public insisted on an exact equivalency between [Candida] and me—because my heroine, astoundingly enough, had turned out to be amanuensis to the Zeitgeist."

What Zeitgeist? The Zeitgeist of women torn between the middle-class virtues of marriage and the longing for freedom. "I suspect," Isadora had confessed in Fear of Flying, "I'd give [independence] up, sell my soul, my principles, my beliefs, just for a man who really loves me." She finds that man in Miss Jong's second novel, in the writer, punster and banjo player Josh Ace, the 26-year-old son of a team of well-known Hollywood screenwriters of the 1930's. At the end of How to Save Your Own Life, Isadora was off to join him.

Now, with Parachutes & Kisses, Erica Jong's third novel in this series, Isadora is approaching 40, is separated from "cold-eyed" Josh and is "possessed of a demonical sexuality which has no need to justify itself with love." But now that "she's flush (though she never believes it) and famous (though she never believes that either) impotent men seem to be everywhere!"

Everywhere, that is, but in her bed, for in this book's opening paragraphs we learn that during her separation she has been consoling herself with a "drugged-out" disk jockey from Hartford, a "cuddly" Jewish banker from New York, a blue-eyed writer from New Orleans, a "cute" Swedish real-estate developer with Caribbean holdings, a lapsed rabbi, an antiques dealer who drives a Rolls despite being a high school dropout, a "brilliant" 26-year-old medical student with access to drugs, a plastic surgeon who's "into oral sex" and "so many others she's practically lost count." Practically.

It's hard to know what to make of this book. There are still some wonderful lines, scenes, dialogue exchanges. The Zeitgeist remains a woman's fear of loneliness, to which now has been added learning "how to make demonic passion jibe with domestic responsibilities, artistic responsibilities, financial responsibilities." The book speaks of Isadora's "quest for love" as being what "linked her to other women, what stirred her vitals not only to sex, but also to poetry; what made her—despite her oddness in being famous and affluent—exactly like other women, exactly like her friends, her sisters, her readers." But it is a quest centered not in her heart and mind but in her reproductive organs. There is a distressing self-serving quality to this book, an annoying arrogance, the giddy presumption that Isadora is speaking not only to women but for women, for all women everywhere.

In one of her chapter headings, Erica Jong quotes Muriel Rukeyser's lines "What would happen if one woman were to tell the truth about her life? The world would split open," a perfectly permissible literary hyperbole, with its promise of sensitivity, honesty and insights. But what are the truths of Isadora's life? The baby-boom generation is middle-aged; steep driveways are hell in the snow; children get hurt when parents divorce; and orgasms feel nice.

Damn it, Fear of Flying was fun! Isadora at 29 was fearless and vulnerable, garrulous and witty, self-mocking and guilt-ridden, tender and earthy. That book burned with a sexual and emotional energy that made one feel one might be in the presence of a young Wife of Bath. There were even moments in How to Save Your Own Life—a marvelously awful orgy, the impact of betrayal on a marriage—but that book contained more smoke than fire. Parachutes & Kisses contains no fire at all. Isadora tells us that "Life has no plot" is one of her favorite lines. Life may not have a plot, but a novel needs one. An endless recitation of sexual episodes is O.K. for the forum section of a girlie magazine, but it does not suffice for a book.

Certainly Erica Jong writes tellingly of nature's cruel paradox, which has women reaching their sexual peak just when their men are being eviscerated by midlife crises, but rather than try to deal sympathetically and insightfully with that dilemma, Isadora's solution is to avoid the problem entirely by seeking out ever younger men. Josh of the second book was six years Isadora's junior; Berkeley (Bean) Sprout III of this latest is younger than Isadora by 14 years. He is

somebody who really loved her and would fiercely protect her no matter how quixotically. He wanted to be her Lancelot…. He understood that underneath her peculiar notoriety (which Josh had finally found so intimidating) there was only a woman who wanted and needed loyalty and love. He was not put off by her fame, did not see her as either a forbidding fortress or a potential acquisition. He saw her only as a person, strong, yet vulnerable.

The reader wishes him luck, for what this reviewer sees is different: Erica Jong turning her back on all that rich Chaucerian promise and settling instead for the self-aggrandizing delusions of a literary Mae West.

C. D. B. Bryan, "The Loves of Isadora, Continued," in The New York Times Book Review, October 21, 1984, p. 14.