Cheap Parachutes and Kisses (Book) (Erica Jong) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Parachutes and Kisses

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.

getting better with age
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.