Willfully Naughty -- Erica Jong Just Can't Resist Being Herself

``Any Woman's Blues''

by Erica Jong

Harper & Row, $18.95

``Any Woman's Blues'' will go down in Erica Jong's canon as the time the novelist tried to kill off her alter ego, Isadora Wing - the heroine of Jong's ``Fear of Flying'' and other less successful novels.

At the start of this newest novel - introduced by a fictional editor who supposedly discovers the manuscript after Isadora's plane goes down in the South Pacific - Jong begins a tale-within-a-tale that's another picaresque narrative about another alter ego, a brilliant artist trying to overcome her sexual addiction to a rampantly unsuitable (and suitably rampant) younger man.

Jong apparently can't quite bring herself, however, to get rid of Isadora, who is discovered at novel's end on a desert island.

Nor can Jong quite get rid of the relentlessly autobiographical writing style that leads all her reviewers and interviewers into discussions of the obvious parallels between her fiction and her realities. As she

successively has fallen in and out of love with four husbands and uncounted lovers, Jong can't resist putting many of them into her novels - first as saviors, later (when the romance sours) as villains.

And so we have the young aspiring actor who is the villain of ``Any Woman's Blues,'' Darton Venable Donegal IV - a dead ringer for the hero of the earlier ``Parachutes and Kisses,'' Berkeley (``Bean'') Sproul III, only much meaner and weaker. Both men are said to be based on young aspiring actor Clayton (``Chip'') C. C. Wheat, to whom the earlier novel was dedicated, but who has decamped from Jong's life by the opening of ``Any Woman's Blues.''

But Chip/Bean/Dart is only following in the fictional footsteps of Jong's previous affiliations; her third husband, writer Jon Fast, has acknowledged that he was memorialized earlier (first positively, later negatively) as ``Josh Ace,'' with parallels descending right down to details of his tall, bearded, balding appearance.

Only the most optimistic reader could refrain from imagining Jong's current husband, lawyer Ken Burrows, running a nervous finger around his collar and wondering how he's going to figure in the next novel.

``Any Woman's Blues'' takes off in the same vein as the ``zipless'' sexual encounter Jong originated in ``Fear of Flying,'' except that this one is, if anything, more bawdy and outrageous. Heroine Leila Sand is obsessed with the loser Dart, who's jealous of her success: When he leaves, he tells her, ``Baby, I tried. I was a seed, and you were a whole forest. I couldn't grow in your shadow.''

Leila tries to free herself from her dependence on booze, drugs and Dart, and there are several forays into affairs (no one seems to have heard of AIDS), a Venetian sojourn, numerous visits to AA, and a truly raunchy sadomasochistic encounter that has led one interviewer to inquire whether the ``candle scene'' were autobiographical.

The writing is funny, witty, often a little grandiose and willfully naughty - and at times delivering home truths many women will recognize. If Jong is giving us the fictional equivalent of books such as ``Women Who Love Too Much,'' at least she knows how to laugh.

Melinda Bargreen is The Seattle Times' classical music critic.