[Malone is an American novelist, editor, nonfiction writer, and critic. In the following review, he provides a mixed assessment of Serenissima.]

Who afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not Erica Jong, who invokes Woolf's Orlando as an epigraph for Serenissima, in which Jessica Pruitt, jet-setting movie star (in Venice to judge a film festival) falls ill midway through the book (Liv Ullmann nurses her—"What are friends for?"), and travels backward in time to the 16th century. There she finds herself transformed into Shylock's daughter—the very role she's been cast to play (despite her 43 years) in "nothing less than a filmic fantasy based on The Merchant of Venice" conceived by a Bergmanesque Swedish genius, "undoubtedly the greatest direct of our time," as well as her former lover. (The actor playing Shylock is also an old lover, but then presumably the honor is not a rare one.)

Nor has our heroine any fear of flying off with young William Shakespeare himself, whose first gasped words as they collide in the Ghetto Vecchio are "who ever loved, who loved not at first sight?" His next are "What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." He then introduces himself as "a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage." Jessica's old Hollywood pals might call this Meeting Cute with a vengeance, but as Will tells her, "Marry, come up, you jest at scars that never felt a wound." The brief adventures of these time-crossed lovers lead them by foot, horse and skiff north through Italy to the Villa Montebello (Belmont in English, the bard explains), where they consummate their love, "that highest of all highs." "Who would dare describe love with the greatest poet the world has ever known?… Was Will Shakespeare good in bed? Let the reader judge!"

After Fanny Hackabout-Jones's willingness to kiss and tell on Pope, Hogarth and Swift, [in Fanny], the reader will not be surprised to hear that Jessica indeed dares describe "Will's stiff staff" in a series of tumbles, including some in which she herself is not a participant: one with his sadistic lover-patron, the Earl of Southampton, and a Venetian courtesan, making "a three-backed beast that pants and screams and begs for mercy"; one in an orgy with fantastically masked, lascivious nuns, immediately after which Will's partner, Juliet, gives birth, then chokes to death on her own vomit, leaving the poet to eulogize: "Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet princess, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

It is this nun's infant, rescued from the murderous convent, whom Jessica and Will flee Venice to save. Violence of course pursues them: Southampton wants to rape and/or kill them both; Shalach (Shylock) wants his daughter and/or his ducats back. The thuggish courtiers Bassanio and Gratiano want bloody revenge. Swords are drawn, bodices ripped and hailstorms hurled from heaven. Christian villagers rampage and slaughter the Jews of Montebello (Will hides behind a hedge ruminating on "What a piece of work is man"). Forced back to Venice by Shalach, Jessica ostensibly dies, floating out of her body to watch Southampton and Shakespeare kiss her in various places, as they "genuflect before [her] orifices." Then, alive in her coffin, like Pericles' wife, she is cast into the sea, where a storm swamps her funeral gondola. She arises, reborn into the 20th century, to discover that she has dreamed (or lived) the screenplay of Serenissima. As Ben Jonson might say, it's some moldy old tale.

Erica Jong has one fictional heroine, brave, bookish, beautiful and indefatigably libidinous, poet of the erogenous zone, priestess of the Great Goddess, whether that heroine is Fanny, the 18th-century whore-turned-pirate-turned-writer, or Isadora, the much married best-selling novelist of the Wing trilogy (a Jew from the West 70's), or the much-married international star Jessica Pruitt (a WASP from the East 70's, who sometimes thinks "being a Jew would be so cozy. They seemed to have more blood, more poetry, more sensuality than my people.") Like her predecessors, Jessica loves sex, her art, her many illustrious friends and her adorable little daughter. Like them, she is irresistibly attractive (she compares herself to a Burne-Jones angel, Botticelli's Venus and the Dark Lady).

Whether in designer clothes, or disguised as a 16th-century boy, Jessica wears—like Isadora, like Fanny—her heart on her sleeve, and thereby suffers: her "openness and trust abused," her lust for life misinterpreted, her hurts unappreciated. She fears, as they did, that she may have loved not wisely but too well (not to mention too often). "Love was my addiction." No doubt, her little body aweary of this great world, tired of the nosy paparazzi and the sequined glitterati (whose life style Ms. Jong captures vividly), Jessica slips into a fevered reverie of magic rings, ancient crones, mysterious potions and literary pornography.

As might be expected of a movie star who has toured Medea in Southern penitentiaries, who refers to her career as her "sullen craft" and "stubborn art," Jessica is perhaps a little more scholarly than the average denizen of "palmy LaLa Land." She not only knows her "Jackie O." and "Paloma P." her carpaccio and Pinot Grigio ("Gore V." bursts into a bedchamber where our heroine has just kneed in the groin an amorous Russian poet), she also knows her Canaletto and Miró, her Byron, Ruskin, James and Joyce. She knows the minor Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene, and the invitational policies of Manhattan PEN meetings. Her speech is sprinkled with Italian phrases; her thoughts are sprinkled with pontifical pronouncements on male domination, motherhood, culture and moral history ("That's the tragedy of our generation—we haven't even got a myth of good battling evil"). For Jessica, far preferable to a starring role in the miniseries "Vegas II" is a world where Will's tendency to quote his yet unwritten works on all occasions is shared by everyone: Southampton reels off sonnets, Shylock wails in passages from Lear, Jessica broods, "We are such stuff as dreams are made of." The odd effect is that they all sound like a mixture of Bartlett's index and Maxwell Anderson's pseudo-Elizabethan argot. The result is a slow, though short, misty dream. Shakespeare does not come to life, and Shylock we barely meet.

As she proved in Fanny, a picaresque of intelligence, buoyant invention and wonderful Rabelaisian energy, Erica Jong can write a historical novel that both honors its tradition with affectionate parody and creates its own full fictional reality. The Renaissance has not served her as well as did the 18th century. Perhaps had she really written the story implied by her premise, the story untold in The Merchant of Venice (of Shylock's daughter, who renounces her faith for a shallow suitor; who confesses, "Alack, what heinous sin is it in me! To be ashamed to be my father's child"), perhaps had she told Jessica's tale, instead of following Shakespeare and Southampton from brothel to convent, Ms. Jong would have found the plot worthy of her careful research, her rich descriptive facility and her deep love of the period. Or she might have produced the novel Tintoretto's Daughter that her Isadora Wing once wrote. Perhaps someday she will.

Michael Malone, "The True Adventures of Shylock's Daughter," in The New York Times Book Review, April 19, 1987, p. 12.