cover image SAPPHO'S LEAP

SAPPHO'S LEAP

Ross MacTaggart, . . Norton, $24.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-393-05762-1

"When a woman is standing on a cliff about to jump into the wine-dark sea, her life does tend to flash before her." So muses Sappho, seventh-century B.C. Greek poet channeling a 1970s vibe in this eighth novel by the author of Fear of Flying. The female version of a Greek hero, Jong's Sappho travels from exile to exile, sleeps with men, women and children, picks up other Greek luminaries and becomes the most famous singer in the land. Jong's imagination is in overdrive, but her perspective sheds little new light on familiar places and peoples—the Centaurs, the Amazons, the Sirens, the Oracle of Delphi. The overly precise historic details feel tacked on, just as the use of Sappho's verse and quotes from Homer give the text a quality of bricolage rather than authenticity. Jong rewrites ancient Greece through a veil of American liberalism and open sexuality. Thus a slave girl pontificates on the rights of man—"Liberty is at the root of all we want.... Choice is the luxury of the free"—and Sappho speaks pop-psych babble—"Why did I feel I had to test him?... I loved Alcaeus, but I didn't know how to love myself." In a series of interludes in which Zeus and Aphrodite watch the earthlings disport themselves, even the goddess of love sounds a bit like Betty Friedan: "I will not silence the only woman's voice that reverberates through time." At least Sappho's frequent, explicit sexual encounters keep the reader turning the pages, though even these methodical titillations belong neither to the seventh nor the 21st century, but to that late-20th-century decade when free love promised direct passage to the Elysian Fields. (May)

Forecast: Sappho's Leapwill sell primarily (if not solely) to Jong loyalists, but this year's 30th anniversary of the publication of Fear of Flying may get the writer a little extra media exposure. 4-city author tour.