"Everything Human Was Imperfect and Ultimately Absurd."

I started reading Fear of Flying last summer, shortly after finishing Portnoy's Complaint. And within the first two pages, I knew that I wasn't ready for another novel of similar ilk. A restless, unhappy woman who has no problem with repeated infidelity against her husband, either real or imagined. 

Now, I have absolutely no problem with vulgar. With blunt, often shocking discussions about sex. Or even with literary stories about infidelity. But I think it was just too much of the same thing within a short time frame. Oddly enough, Portnoy was even mentioned in this book, so apparently the similarities were not just me connecting the two that I happened to read in close proximity and were the author connecting them herself. 

The novel is about Isadora Wing, who is attending a psychiatric conference in Vienna with her husband. We find out early while she's on the plane there that many of the conference attendees have either been Isadora's lover, or her shrink, or both. At the conference, Isadora meets Adrian, a free-spirited, tell-it-like-it-is shrink with a penchant for analyzing her (although in fairness, all of the shrinks do) and they commence a torrid love affair in full view of everyone, including her husband, Bennett. Per Adrian's request, she leaves her husband and they take off together to drive around Europe together for the duration of the summer. The entire time they're gone, Isadora has constant emotional turmoil about all of her past and current relationships, much of which she shares with Adrian. 

And while the above describes the actual storyline of the book, it's really so much more about relationships and the maintenance of one's identity while in them, particularly for the woman. I found the character of Isadora insufferable and I don't know if I've ever wanted to crawl through a book and smack someone as much as I wanted to smack her. She constantly wallows in self-pity, insecurity, and the banality of life yet mocked and derided all others - married women, mothers, people at the beach just enjoying themselves. Projecting her misery onto others. There was so much I really disliked about the book when it came to how it was written - it felt like just a lot of whining and bitching about things while being 100% completely self-aware that you're the problem (insert sound clip of Taylor Swift's, "It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me," here). 

But when it came to a lot of the observations about identity in relationships, there were some snippets that I did enjoy and putting it into context of being written in the early 1970s, it was interesting to see how much of that has changed in 50 years. Particularly about women having to be married for any kind of stability, but the author takes it even farther that women need to be in a relationship to have any kind of emotional stability as well. And that seemed to be the biggest thing that the character of Isadora was railing against. I ended up liking the book more than I thought I would when I set it aside last year but definitely not one I would recommend to others or would want to read again.

And so onto the next. Which is White Noise by Don Delillo. 

A friend of mine introduced me to the PopSugar Reading Challenge, which is a list of 50 reading prompts, to try to read one book for each prompt during 2023. I am delighted and excited to give this a shot! Although reading 50 books in one year would be about double what I did last year. But we'll see how it goes! And I must admit that just plotting it out takes quite a bit of time. So I'll be counting Fear of Flying for the prompt of "A book you meant to read in 2022."

181 to go!