In Search of Sexual Healing

THE plot of Erica Jong's new novel, Any Woman's Blues quite literally never gets out of bed. As the author herself says in the forward to the novel, "[It] is not for the prudish...It is throbbing and raw to a degree that will shock the most hardened libertine."

Any Woman's Blues

by Erica Jong

Harper and Row

$19.95, 362 pages

Translation: this book has lots and lots of sex. In fact, it is mostly sex.

Any Woman's Blues purports to be a novel detailing one woman's coming to terms with herself, escaping her addictions to drugs, alcohol, sex and food, and learning that self-love is enough. But it is really a disturbing tale of leather and peignoirs, money, motorcycles and Georgia O'Keefe-like paintings, Alchoholics Anonymous and New York nightlife--material more befitting Jay McInerney than Jong.

The only thing that saves Any Woman's Blues from the junkpile of drugstore soft-core porn is Jong's reputation, the "men aren't everything" conclusion and a few stylistic tricks that make the book an interesting read.

Jong writes the book with three different names. Caryl Fleishmann-Stanger writes the forward. Isadora Wing, the heroine of Jong's most famous novel Fear of Flying, writes the story itself and is given to recording, in the middle of narrative text, arbitrary conversations with Leila Sand, the novel's protagonist.

BY employing such a variety of voices, Jong can tell the reader exactly what to think of the story. In the forward, for example, she uses Fleishmann-Stanger to give a "scholarly view" of the novel, telling us that "Any Woman's Blues is a fable for our times."

By interjecting conversation between Sand and Wing throughout the story, Jong claims she will show the reader the process of writing the novel, the struggle between author and subject when the story becomes as real for the writer as her life.

And in the afterword, Wing can dispel any illusions we might have had that the story was a novel--for in reality, she writes, it was her life--and she can once again emphasize the tenuous connections between author and subject and the multiplicities of "I" when she says: "My tale has no end. Like Chinese boxes within boxes, like Russian dolls within dolls, like an onion peeling back its skin, we go on revealing our hearts in the hope that they may never stop beating."

Although Any Woman's Blues employs an interesting technique for giving the author multiple voices and questioning the existence of a singular "I," Jong is all together too self-conscious at times.

The conversations between Wing and Sand become less a way to show the process of writing a story than a means for saving the story. When the chapters full of Alcoholics Anonymous rhetoric overwhelm and the words "fuck" and "cock" appear for the thousandth time, Wing interrupts and asks Sand if this isn't all a little ridiculous. Sand reminds her that life is ridiculous and that trying to turn reality into a novel cannot alter the excesses of life.

THE real problem with this technique is that the reader begins to sympathize with Wing instead of the ridiculously self-indulgent protagonist. For example, the forward mentions a note that Wing supposedly writes to her research assistant at the end of the first chapter: "[Please] do a computer search and see how many times the word "cock" is used in this chapter. I feel like I'm drowning in pubic hair--if he prongs her once more I'll scream."

Apt. Very apt.

The book proposes to detail Sand's quest for self-fulfillment, but Jong sets up an unrealistic dichotomy between self-love and romantic love, making the former emotional and the latter purely orgasmic. The men she loves don't love her, but they do give her multiple orgasms--they take her to Henry Miller's infamous "Land of Fuck."

And it is in this "Land of Fuck" where Jong locates Any Woman's Blues, both as a title and as a concept. While Jong claims that the book "has as its theme a woman's search for a way out of addictive love and toward real selflove," the protagonist continues to flip back and forth between emotional and physical addiction, with a clear bent towards the physical.

This is particularly troubling given Jong's reputation as a feminist writer. True, the search to find satisfaction in developing a sense of self, not in male approval, was one of the important elements of the women's movement. But this story of a spoiled, self-indulgent woman who calls her twin girls "Mike" and "Ed" and falls for married men with bulges in their pants leaves the reader hard-pressed to find a strong feminist message. And it doesn't really address any woman's blues.