Customer Reviews

Parachutes and Kisses

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

It is so rare to read follow-on novels that are in fact better than the original bestseller and continuing to improve. This one is perhaps even better - certainly more mature - than How to Save Your Life. I still think that for a hilarious and yet sad reflection of the pre-Aids 1970s and early 1980s, Jong is simply our best novelist. The psychology, the needs, the pain, and the ironies are so realistically and touchingly rendered that I found myself completely believing in the character. It is a first-rate effort and a pity that it is out of print.

While this is yet another novel about divorce and the search for both perfect love and always-spectacular sex, the protagonist has grown into a kind of world weariness along with her concerns on how to bring up her daughter. While she is still willing to experiment with guacomole in the nether regions, it is about entering middle age, with the baggage that so many of us carry, and yet keeping one's idealism and hope alive. The passages on her ex-husband are divinely insightful and comic, from his inability to become independent of powerful parents (and how that hinders his own creative development); I still chuckle about her exmother-in-law - in her quip "at least she's s nice girl" - "demolishing" both her son's new girlfriend and his ex-wife in one sentence. (Isadora "marvelled" at her effiecincy.)

Highest recommendation.

"How to Save Your Own Life" closed with Isadora basking in the sunset of Malibu with her young prince happily ever after and on that note we open to the first sentence of Parachutes and Kisses only to discover paradise in Malibu has eluded our heroin. Isadora Wing has been through analysis, found writing success, a third marriage, and a child only to discover she married a child and then had one with him.

Distraught and lost, Isadora journeys through another divorce, tax problems, single motherhood, and endless nannies looking for her demon lover. Parachutes and Kisses chronicles more exploration of self with regard to the love she feels for her third husband and the obvious pain of divorce, especially when there is a child involved.

This is another great book from Erica Jong about finder yourself and the inner strength that knowing who you are and what you're capable of brings. If you read Erica Jongs' book: Seducing the Demon Writing for My Life, which is somewhat of a short memoir, you might recognize some of the characters in Parachutes and Kisses.

A wonderful book!

girldiver:)

Nowadays they have treatment centers for people with this affliction, but way back when this book was published it was considered daring and exciting. The heroine never meets a man she doesn't want to trot off to bed with and describe the coupling in minute detail. After awhile, every time she met a man (no matter how unappetizing) I'd wince, thinking, "Oh here we go again" and brace myself. It seemed aimless and pointless and pathetic. At one point the heroine says (moaning yet again about some man who had done her wrong), that he had separated her from the two things that meant the most to her: her child and her writing. But in truth she doesn't seem to care much about either of them and treats them as peripherals in her life while she pursues her sweaty encounters with anyone with a Y chromosome.

Join Charlie Sheen, Tiger Woods, and Rob Lowe...just don't write about it.

I loved Erica Jong and FOF, but was really disappointed with this book.

She is still wondering why she hasn't found her "one true love." Isadora has become sort of pathetic, really. She mistakes hedonism with happiness, like a 400-pound binge eater with heartburn hoping another bag of cookies will make them feel light and energetic again.

But in this case she sleeps with anything in pants, drinks and uses drugs and wonders why her so-called "relationships" don't last. If she didn't seem to take herself so seriously I would think that was the lesson in the book.

Love this book. Couldn't wait to turn the page to see what happens next. Weather real or imagined it is funny. Those where the good old days. Ms. Erica really knows how to put the pen to the paper to brighten up the that time in history. I have read all her the books and they get funnier as she matures.

this is the 3rd book in the series and i was a little dissapointed. I loved Isadora in first person! but not so much in 3rd. Overall great book and read though.

This is Erica Jong at her best and worst. As I read it, I kept grabbing a pencil to fix obvious mistakes and editorial oversights, and in other places I despaired of ever fixing her klunky prose and clumsy expositions. For a poet, her prose is anything but lyrical.

Yet Erica cannot be beat for her sense of felt life, for her honest reflection on and accurate depiction of the human condition. More pages in my copy of _Parachutes and Kisses_ are underlined and dogeared for future reference than in my copy of _To The Lighthouse_ - and I was reading Virginia Woolf for a literature class where analysis was expected! Erica shows parts of herself - and parts of myself - to me in ways that no one else comes close to, in spite of the fact that she is hiding behind her doppelganger, Isadora Wing.

This subterfuge leads to some unavoidable confusion. Having read two books by Erica Jong about Isadora Wing (_Parachutes and Kisses_ and _Fear of Flying_) and one book ostensibly by Isadora Wing about a woman painter (_Any Woman's Blues_), it is hard to separate what Erica wrote from what Isadora is supposed to have written. At one point a character in _Parachutes_ accuses Isadora of having started "the whole thing" (the sexual revolution) with that chapter about the "Zipless ___." But Erica wrote that chapter in a book about Isadora - only by stretching our interpretation of the paralelism of their lives and careers can we arrive at the inference that one of Isadora's early books contained the same chapter.

Overall, this book met my litmus test for a good book. When it was finished and I put it on the shelf, carefully filed with the rest of my Erica Jong collection, I felt like I was saying "good bye" to a close friend: a friend with her own flaws and peccadilloes, but a friend I will treasure.