Jong Erica. Inventing Memory - A Novel of Mothers and Daughters

(Of Blessed Memory)First published in 1997, Inventing Memory is about four generations of remarkable women from a Jewish-American family-their triumphs, tragedies, scandals, and love affairs-as related by Sara Solomon, the youngest of these women. While trying to chronicle their history, the story becomes essentially hers, as she comes to understand the nature of memory, the way all of us both invent and assimilate our ancestors. In learning about the women in her family, Sara discovers how to create her own future.In Jong's newest work, four generations of talented, beautiful Jewish women: Sarah, Salome, Sally, and Sara - fill ten decades with tragic, action-packed lives shaped by the challenges of Jewish history and the misery created by the deeply flawed men they choose. In the early 1900s, Sarah flees a deadly pogrom in Russia and paints her way to fame and fortune in America. Sarah's daughter, Salome, sleeps and writes her way through literary Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Salome's daughter, Sally, a tormented product of the Sixties, drowns her soul in a numbing mess of drugs, men, and alcohol while skyrocketing to the top of the music charts. In the new millennium, Sally's child, Sara, with her own daughter in tow, leaves a failing marriage and spurns the love of the only wholly decent man in this tale to unravel the secrets of Judaism and feminism that molded her famous relatives. Jong is a gifted writer who tells a captivating story, but one does have to question her reluctance to part with her now-tired insistence on peppering her novels with scenes of gratuitous vulgarity. It worked in Fear of Flying, but nearly a quarter of a century later, it would have been nice to be able to recommend this title to a broader audience.Jong should stick to nonfiction. Her last book, Fear of Fifty (1994), was a frank and well-constructed memoir. Her new novel evinces none of the smarts or style she is capable of, in fact, this multigenerational family saga spanning the entire twentieth century is a maddening mishmash of trivialized history and cliched fantasy. And that's a shame, because several of Jong's characters, Jewish women who exemplify chutzpah and creativity, are engaging and thoroughly enjoyable, particularly the indomitable Sarah who escapes the pogroms of Russia, makes her way alone to America at the tender age of 15, and becomes a successful portrait painter. If Jong had told Sarah's story, and the story of her flapper-writer daughter Salome, and her musician daughter Sally, and her scholarly daughter Sara, in a lucid and dramatic manner, this would have been a fine work of pop fiction. Instead, Jong chose to connect her narrative to every watershed event of the last 100 years, dragging in real people such as Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein for silly cameos, imitating (badly) D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, and using (clumsily) such devices as letters, journals entries, and even a fake interview to stand in for solid, straight-ahead writing. There are some sunny moments when Jong captures the atmosphere of certain times and places, quotes clever Yiddish proverbs, or actually offers some insights into love and the bond between mothers and daughters, but by trying to do too much, she has done too little.