Fear of Dying

May 11, 2015
More than 40 years after the publication of the cultural touchstone Fear of Flying, Jong delivers a not-quite sequel—an exploration of the emotional and sexual consciousness of Vanessa Wonderman, an actress who threw herself into the role of wife of the kind, wealthy, 20-years-older Asher when Vanessa’s “acting career had gone to that place women’s acting careers used to go when they neared fifty.” Now sandwiched between ailing parents and a pregnant daughter, and unwilling to “retreat into serene sexlessness,” Vanessa is “just unhinged enough” to place an Internet ad looking for someone to “come celebrate Eros one afternoon per week.” So what makes this a sequel? The website where she posted the ad is Zipless.com, the name ripped off from her best friend Isadora Wing, who coined the term zipless to describe a certain kind of one-night encounter in the original Fear Of book. (Fear of Fifty, a memoir, was released in 1994.) With Isadora, Jong ushered in a bold new way for women to talk about their sex lives and their desire to pursue pleasure for its own sake. It’s canny of Jong to tie this story back to Isadora’s original quest for something like sexual fulfillment—and Isadora pops up in this story to act as a wizened guide. Unfortunately, it’s Vanessa who narrates this story, and while readers may be amused by Jong’s trademark humor, which reads like catching up with a very chatty and revealing friend, Vanessa as a character is too self-absorbed to provoke any feeling other than relief when it’s over. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME Entertainment.

July 1, 2015
Jong's first novel since Sappho's Leap (2003). As a young woman, Vanessa Wonderman was a successful stage actress. She even had a midlife run as the villain on a nighttime soap opera. When she married a billionaire 20 years her senior, she recognized that she was choosing love and comfort over adventure. But now her parents are dying and her husband's had a heart attack and she's reconsidering the choices she's made. As the title suggests, this novel is a bookend to Jong's scandalous debut. Isadora Wing, the protagonist from Fear of Flying, reappears-older and wiser-as Vanessa's best friend. Desperate to feel vital in the midst of decay and death, Vanessa places a personals ad on zipless.com (another reference, of course, to Jong's first novel). What follows is the heroine reflecting on her slightly wild past and her mildly terrifying present as she auditions potential lovers who range from the disappointing to the alarming. All of this is promising, but spending almost 300 pages with Vanessa is like enduring a trans-Atlantic flight with a seatmate who never stops talking but doesn't have a whole lot to say. Vanessa's greatest weakness-as a narrator, definitely, and possibly as a person-is her truly spectacular self-absorption. She drifts off into observation on topics like war and the Internet and female circumcision without recognizing that she has nothing new to say on any of them. Worst of all, though, is the fact that the culture seems to have outpaced Jong when it comes to sex. Vanessa wonders at the fact that she and Isadora are able to speak candidly of S&M; neither Vanessa nor her author seems to know that this is now the stuff of prime-time TV. Jong does have interesting-even arresting-things to say about age and dying. They're just hard to find in this overlong and self-satisfied novel. Not without its moments.

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Starred review from July 1, 2015
Fear of Flying (1973), Jong's sexually candid first novel starring the intrepid Isadora Wing, rocked the zeitgeist. Two dozen books later, Jong presents a new erotically forthright and slyly philosophical novel about an irreverent sexpot New Yorker struggling to adjust to turning 60 while caring for her beloved aging poodle, seriously ailing parents, and older billionaire husband (her fourth) turned cardiac patient. An actor most famous for her role as a soap-opera villainess, Vanessa, the second of three sisters, is assailed by memories of her effervescent theater family (King Lear jokes are rampant), while her daughter, an actor and rehab alum, is about to have a baby. Relying on her best friend, writer Isadora Wing, for perspective, Vanessa has a face lift, seeks hot sex online, lavishes love on the dying, and issues barbed observations about everything from the sea of lunacy that is the Internet to the potentially world-improving power of grandmothers. Flashy, flip, and hilarious as well as smart and wise, Vanessa ruminates on the mysteries and absurdities of life and death and asks, Why is it so hard to be a human being? Jong has created such an extraordinarily direct and intimate narrative voice, one almost forgets that this bravura performance is a work of fiction. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Jong is a beacon for several generations of readers, and her first novel in more than a decade will garner much excitement as it's launched with a major national marketing campaign.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2015

Jong's first book in ten years is also a sequel to her most famous one--and the title signals immediately how much time has passed since the 1973 publication of Fear of Flying. In her sixties and still beautiful, former actress Vanessa Wonderman is caught between her ailing parents, aging husband, and pregnant daughter. Since her husband isn't up for sex anymore, she places an ad on a site called Zipless.com and must turn for help to friend Isadora Wing when the responses start upending her life.

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