Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.
Although Erica Jong felt that her first novel, Fear of Flying (1973), was too literary for wide appeal, it rapidly became a best seller, its humor and eroticism praised on the dust jacket by John Updike and Henry Miller as well as by Hannah Greene and Elizabeth Janeway, but its literary qualities frequently ignored or even savagely castigated in reviews by such critics as Walter Clemons, Ellen Hope Meyer, Paul Theroux, Patricia S. Coyne, and Martin Amis. Characteristic of the criticisms is the following evaluation by Hope Meyer in The Nation, January 12, 1974: "literary it is not. Poorly constructed, too prone to phrases like 'our mouths melted like liquid,' it has a shapeless, self-indulgent plot and weak characterization, especially of the men." Such weaknesses supposedly exist because "There is no artistic distance between the author and her subject, and hence no objectivity."
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