Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters

Rating:
Summary: Why, Erica, why?
Review: I first read Jong's famous Fear of Flying while in college, when the heroine was the ancient-seeming age of 27ish. Have since reread every few years through the present, now well through my 30s, and I still find FoF not only a great read but full of new insight.
Why, oh, why then, can't this woman write another novel I can bear to get through? I can't say I've tried them all (maybe Fear of 50, though not a novel, holds the most promise), but How to Save Your Own Life, for example, and now Inventing Memory, drive me to distraction with their lovingly self-indulgent descriptions of the main Jong character that lacks any of the funny self-deprecating description of FoFlying. The soft-core prose without the bite. Narrative sometimes get going but is quickly knocked off its wheels by the occasionally trenchant but mostly excessive Yiddish proverbs that litter every few paragraphs. A cheesy mess.
Maybe my expectations are just too high, as I still call Flying one of my all time favorite books -- not just because it's fun, but because it offered such dead-on descriptions of questions a woman asks herself as she's coming into her own, plagued alternately by belief in her own brilliance and star power and the fear of failing, as well as wrestling with the idea of where love/men should figure into one's life.
Gone and by the wind-grieved Erica, come back again.

Rating:
Summary: I expected it to be better
Review: I have read almost all of Erica Jong's earlier books, & I was looking forward to reading this one. Although in the beginning this novel seemed promising (Sarah's story is very lively & well told) later the book dragged on and on...Jong's central themes (women versus men, spirit versus day to day life) were better explored in her earlier works.