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.
Initial critical reaction to Erica Jong's Fear of Flying sold the book but did little to establish its considerable literary value. Particularly cutting, and more often than not, hostile, were the women who linked Jong's work to the tradition of Austen, Eliot, and the Brontes in their reviews and found the novel wanting. Ironically, the feminist critics were both negative and positive. For some, the book was trivial and did not state the case; others responded like Carol Tavris who said: "Jong has captured perfectly the dilemmas of the modern woman, the ironies of liberation and independence" Psychology Today 8, 1975. And still other reviewers joined Jane Crain in an unforgiving dismissal: "Taken one by one, no feminist novel really rewards critical scrutiny—they are all too steeped in ideology to pay the elementary respect to human complexity that good fiction demands" [Commentary, December, 1974]. With considerably more generosity, men tended to review the book as a good popular novel, a cut above Diary of a Mad Housewife, with the welcome addition of considerably more humor. Though Paul Theroux [New Statesman, 19 April 1974] and the anonymous TLS reviewer [Times Literary Supplement, 26 July 1974] were denigrating as well as negative and Alfred Kazin disregarded the work, Henry Miller praised it as "a female Tropic of Cancer" [New York Times, 20 August 1974]. To be sure, there were references to poor characterization, lack of irony or distance in the narration, but, on balance, John Updike's "… feels like a winner. It has class, and sass, brightness and bite. Containing all the cracked eggs of the feminist litany, her souffle rises with a poet's afflatus" [The New Yorker, 17 December 1973] seemed to be the prevailing male judgement.
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