From The Stacks Update: Erica Jong, FEAR OF FLYING, Not A Self-Help Book

Naturally, I didn't think this book was a self-help book when I picked it up -- but I think the people on the bus to New York this weekend who saw me reading my first From the Stacks book might have thought I was self-medicating on the way to Newark Airport. Rest easy, people, I love planes.

No, FEAR OF FLYING is, according to the back copy on my 25-cent paperback, an erotic novel extraordinaire which is supposed to scare guys who think women don't think about sex. And given that it was published in 1973, the novel is groundbreaking for how frank it is. Isadora Wing is in Vienna with her second husband who is great in bed and eerily quiet the rest of the time, tempted and seduced by a British psychologist she meets at a conference, trying to sort out how her sex life got to be such a mess. As Isadora gets deeper into the affair she goes backwards to her first marriage and her first sexual experiences to guide her in the present.

I liked this book first of all because it avoided that cliche of dramatic independent movies and lazy authors, the Infidelity-As-Necessity plot. Or rather, as Isadora decides to be unfaithful to her husband, she recognizes that what she's doing is wrong, what she's doing will hurt him and that her affair won't fix anything. Maybe it's because I'm in a relationship right now, but I feel like I'm always pushing away books or movies in which Character has an affair because she or he just had to, and the book or movie seems to support that kind of necessity. I'm not saying Isadora and her type should go down like Madame Bovary for her infidelities, but enough of the pretense that cheating on your spouse is fun and glamorous and not at all hurtful, eh?

But another reason I liked it is that Isadora's voice is just so well done. I related to her own long-winded explanations far more than I expected to, because she's just so blatantly honest. Too late I realize, there's a reason this book became a ridiculous success -- not because Isadora is written like Everywoman, because she's placed very specifically in 1970s upper-middle-class educated New York City, but because she has universal appeal.

Here's the new list, although no guarantees I'll go in order:

1. Erica Jong, FEAR OF FLYING
2. Herman Wouk, MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR
3. Ben Yagoda, ABOUT TOWN: THE NEW YORKER AND THE WORLD IT MADE
4. Kirsten Lobe, PARIS HANGOVER
5. Adrian Nicole Leblanc, RANDOM FAMILY

Learn more about the From the Stacks Challenge here.