Amazon.com Review
Erica Jong burst onto the American literary and cultural scene with her audacious bestseller Fear of Flying and has been cast as a feminist spokesperson ever since--a curious conundrum for a bawdy, sometimes raging intellectual who failed so miserably to repudiate men that she married repeatedly and worried so much about growing older that she signed up for plastic surgery. Yet it's these very inconsistencies that have made her less didactic over time. The brief essays in What Do Women Want? veer from contemplation of the impossible tightrope of motherhood, the accursed nature of Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the unexpurgated Anaïs Nin to the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't life of literary women and the fatal charm of Italy. There's also a surprisingly sweet paean to that horny old goat, Henry Miller (the subject of Jong's biographical study The Devil at Large).
This is Jong at her best and worst, alternately flailing wildly and landing squarely on the mark. "It's hard to be a novelist in the age of soap opera," she observes, commenting on American President Clinton's sexual peccadilloes. "The slow accretion of 500 well-wrought words a day seems pointless beside the dizzying and breathless plot lines served up by the evening news." The delicious irony of the book's title is no accident; it's a question Sigmund Freud asked and never satisfactorily answered. Neither does Jong, but her cultural commentary has flashes of brilliance and the moxie necessary to cut to the head of the line. --Francesca Coltrera --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Jong is sometimes a lot of fun to read. The "sometimes" is the problem with this random collection of essays, some of which bounce off the news headlines and some of which sound like presentations to eager undergraduates. Jong is snippy and funny on the subject of the impotence drug Viagra?would we have expected less from the author of the famously raunchy Fear of Flying? But she can't resist pointing out that she was ahead of her time in 1973 when her heroine Isadora Wing opined on the subject of male limpness. Jong is interesting and trenchant on why we have such mixed feelings toward Hillary Rodham Clinton. She is academic on the subject of Charlotte Bronte and less than discreet about Henry Miller and his seemingly unalloyed admiration of her. She likes Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov, but it is hard not to balk a little when she describes herself as a "celebrated writer" in such company. Judging by her frequent references to her own notorious frankness, the celebration may be more sexual than literary. Complain, complain as ruffled critics have done since Isadora made her noisy debut 25 years ago, but at the end of it all Erica Jong is an original. One may flinch at a writer who can't leave the subject of sex for more than a paragraph or two but at the same time be seduced by one who believes in the power of poetry and introduces her miscellany with the words "Poetry has saved my life. I think it can save yours."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
