The problem – and I write as someone who has recently experienced similar losses – is that neither Vanessa nor her creator does anything beyond rail against the human condition. Even her dog dies, following an illness as protracted as that of her parents. The latter is her real concern, prompted by the demise of her parents and her husband’s near-fatal heart attack. Vanessa’s throwaway remarks about sex hardly suggest that she will turn out to be a repository of original insights into death. It’s hard to imagine an unknown author getting away with such distasteful nonsense. Vanessa allows that it’s ‘health-destroying and horrible’ but adds that ‘at least women have other things to think about than their pussies’. In a cringe-making passage, she talks blithely about ‘female circumcision’ rather than female genital mutilation: ‘You think female circumcision is bad?’ she demands of an imaginary reader. When her much older husband starts to have erectile problems, she advertises for sexual partners on a website and treats it as a joke when one of them sends her abusive texts. These are women whose attitudes to sex were formed in the 1960s and they seem never to have reconsidered them, as evidenced by Vanessa’s admiration for the Marquis de Sade. Vanessa and Isadora resemble their creator to such an extent that multiple Jongs seem to flit through the pages of the book. She has a poodle called Belinda Barkawitz and her best friend is Isadora Wing, heroine of Jong’s bestselling novel Fear of Flying. Her protagonist, an actress in her early sixties called Vanessa Wonderman, lives with her fabulously wealthy husband in New York.

In that sense, Erica Jong can’t be accused of going after the sympathy vote. They share some of the existential anxieties of ordinary people, but such gilded living makes empathy a bit of a stretch.

They go to glitzy parties and sociable AA meetings and they have cosmetic surgeons on hand to smooth out lines and wrinkles. They live in spacious apartments in Manhattan and own ski places in Aspen. The characters in Erica Jong’s new novel are not like the rest of us.

Fear of flying erica jong review