Too Blue

By Alessandra Stanley

ANY WOMAN'S BLUES

by Erica Jong

Harper & Row; 362 pages; $18.95

In her new novel, Any Woman's Blues, Erica Jong has at last created a heroine even she couldn't love. Leila Sand is blond, randy and famous -- as a painter of "vaginal art." She is fortyish but still, she keeps assuring us, attractive: "I don't look worse than a 22-year-old -- to some men I look better." And like all Jong alter egos, she is looking for love in all the wrong places. The result is the bitter lament of a successful woman sexually obsessed with a much younger man. Leila keeps citing Colette and Cheri, but Cher comes more readily to mind. Come to think of it, so does Norma Desmond of Sunset Boulevard.

When she catches her lover Darton Venable Donegal IV with another woman at a chic restaurant, Leila first notices he is at a "bad table," then sneers at his girlfriend's cheap perfume ("Charlie!") and inelegant neighborhood ("Hoboken!"). After her ten-year-old daughter confides that Darton, who likes rough sex, has spanked her, Leila is outraged, then forgets to do anything about it.

Leila is fond of exalted similes. "My heart blazes like Shelley's on that beach" (her boyfriend is back); "I wander in like Theseus into the Labyrinth" (she's in the wine cellar); "We lie together, Pan and Ceres, the god of the woods and the goddess of grain" (afterglow). Half the novel is about her ill-fated passion; the rest is her resume. Leila did the '60s ("I produced happenings with Yoko Ono") and civil rights ("Mississippi with Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney"). She sounds a little like the pathological liar on Saturday Night Live: Yeah, that's it, I dated Martin Luther King, that's the ticket.

At first it seems as if Jong has deliberately created a boorish, self- deluded heroine, like the flawed narrator in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, whose unreliable confessions the reader learns to unravel and reinterpret. Nope. No such luck. Jong takes Leila Sand seriously. Worse yet, she expects the reader to do the same.

Jong's best seller Fear of Flying (1973) became an emblem for the sexual revolution and women's liberation. With Any Woman's Blues, Jong is trying to put her mark on the '80s, when safe sex replaced free love and materialism, and addiction treatment became the ruling ethos. With no irony intended, she creates as her heroine a sex addict who goes to A.A. meetings, a free-spirited artist who uses a Lalique bowl to paint a still life and wears Zandra Rhodes.

There is too much careless repetition (three different sets of "mammary hills," two sightings of "debutramps with trust funds"). The heroine, when despondent, listens to legendary blues singer Bessie Smith; the title, Any Woman's Blues, is from a Smith song. Chapter headings included, Smith's name is dropped 24 times. As the legendary blues singer once said, "Oh, shut up."