Oral History

By LANCE MORROW

HOW TO SAVE YOUR OWN LIFE

by ERICA JONG

310 pages. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. $8.95.

Erica Jong writes not so much novels as almost breathlessly up-to-date confessional bulletins. When last seen in Fear of Flying, Jong (who calls herself Isadora Wing on paper) was soaping up in her psychiatrist-husband's bathtub, waiting rather ambiguously for him to return and forgive her for the 340-page sexual excursion that made up the novel.

It didn't work out. At the start of How to Save Your Own Life, Erica/Isadora is slipping out of the Wing/Jong Upper West Side co-op apartment for the last time, leaving the doctor to his patients and as Isadora says, "his hatred of women." Writes the heroine: "I was on the lam, an exile from a bad marriage, a wandering Jewess; a lifelong New Yorker heading Wes ... I was off to meet a lover and my destiny." In Jong's wall-poster philosophy, today is the first day of the rest of your life.

Fear of Flying possessed a bawdy exuberance. John Updike even found it Chaucerian. But How to Save Your Own Life is marinated in sour juices: dissolving marriage, curdled fame, Hollywood's treachery. "Ain't it awful?" the reader mutters. Erica/Isadora uses the book to settle old scores against her husband ("I married a monster, I think") and a hustling Hollywood producer who, she says, flimflammed her on the film rights to the bestselling first novel. Before she gets around to making the final break with Dr. Wing, Isadora has a lesbian affair, checks in with a brace of former lovers (male), flies West to work on her film, and there finds the vacant, curiously dippy Josh, a 27-year-old aspiring screenwriter who is to be the love of her life. For now, anyway, Isadora composes lines to him that read like hard-core Kahlil Gibran: "My soul is mine;/ My mouth belongs to you."

How to Save Your Own Life is written in six or seven different styles, ranging from academic hauteur (she says she was "amanuensis to the Zeitgeist") through Cosmo cute ("Bed reared its ugly headboard") to bewilderingly lifeless porn. The author's mind seems to have been softened by too many hours in a Malibu Jacuzzi. As if searching for a new definition of vulgarity, Jong writes that hostile criticism of her first novel makes her think of "Jews gassed at Auschwitz." (Actually, Fear of Flying was extravagantly overpraised.) She also contrives to turn the tragic suicide of Poet Anne Sexton (named "Jeannie" in the book) into a kind of posthumous blurb for herself.

The woman is enough to make readers think that sex really is dirty. She describes remarkably unpleasant oral activities with her female lover; if a man had written that, feminists would have beaten him unconscious with a copy of The Hite Report. The heroine is forever masturbating. Sex is often joyless or, when it is good, it sounds like 42nd Street: "Hot . . . hard . . . dripping . . . throbbing." At one point, Isadora complains: "While the whole world is f-- away behind closed doors, all I do is write, write, write." Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Ms. Jong?

Lance Morrow

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