Virginia Ironside
SEPTUAGENARIAN SEX
Unaccompanied Women
By Jane Juska (Chatto & Windus 253pp £12.99)

As this is a book about a book, in order to get through this one, you need to have waded through the first one: Jane Juska’s A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance. In this, the author recounted what happened after she’d placed an advertisement in the New York Review of Books which read: ‘Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.’ Billed as a strike for sexual freedom for the mature (actually very mature) woman, it came across as a tragic wail from someone who was young in the Fifties but who clearly wished she’d been young in the Sixties.

As a result of the ad, Jane managed to get quite a few orgasms under her belt but oh, what a price she had to pay! Eighty-two-year-old Jonah, for example, insisted she talked dirty the first night and, on the second, announced that he didn’t desire her – ‘Get yourself some KY jelly. You get dry before I can get in, and I can’t keep it up long enough for you to get wet,’ he said, brutally, before fleeing with the two champagne flutes that she’d brought to drink from, not to mention the trousers of her red silk jim-jams. Then she met Robert. He was a member of AA and already had a girlfriend, whom he rang repeatedly, in order to tell her he loved her. He had also started drinking again. The following lovers were equally, if not more, unappetising (one of them sucked boiled sweets when they had sex) and finally she bumped into the much younger Graham, whom she adored because he pompously uttered this smug and well-worn cliché, which it appears she had never heard before in her life: ‘The greatest pleasure for me in making love is giving the other person pleasure.’

In her latest book, Juska tells us what happened next. And the answer is, apart from a lot of waffle about being a sad old woman, not a lot. Graham, naturally, dumped her for a young girl because he hoped to have children; she spent a lot of her time going on book-signing tours, and talking to women’s groups, but still, at the age of seventy-three, Jane hasn’t grown up. It’s not her desperation for a man that is so unattractive, nor her excessive admiration for Trollope (Jesus!), it’s her naivety, her total lack of wisdom or self-respect, which, while understandable in a girl of twenty-five or even a woman of thirty-five, is really unacceptable in a very mature woman.

And yet, if she’s to be believed, in the States she’s apparently fêted as some kind of guru. Everywhere she goes, older women are lining up to meet her with tears in their eyes, begging her for the secret of how to Find a Man. Juska’s reply is always the simple mantra: ‘Go online.’

Jane Juska spends most of this book parading her love of art. Books are more to her than food, music sublime, she’s always visiting an art gallery or discussing the meaning of life with friends. She’s one of those American women who can be found by the libraryload in East Coast towns – no doubt quite fun to meet in a kind of slobbery Alsatian puppy kind of way, but someone who would soon drive you nuts after she’d mentioned Walt Whitman, Proust or Eliot for the thousandth time.

In this book we hear that she falls for people like Dan, a man who

taught me to love opera, black-and-white movies, and, on Sunday afternoons, champagne. Accompanied by the glories of La Traviata playing at top volume on his fine stereo, we toasted each other, celebrating our like-mindedness on books and music and people, very few of whom escaped our often malicious judgment.

She falls for people like Graham (‘Why is it’, asks this ‘wit’, ‘that on a Chinese menu you have to get to at least number fifteen before anything seems interesting?’) – a man who reads Proust aloud to her in the mornings.

In the only good scene in the book, where she has disastrous and meaningless sex with Malcolm, the foreplay consists of a conversation about Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, which they had seen in London:

‘I love Stoppard but not Jumpers,’ says Jane.

‘How can you not love a play about logical positivism?’ says Malcolm.

‘Logical positivism does not a play make. He should’ve written a book,’ says Jane. ‘Would you agree that Jumpers is not Stoppard’s best?’

It all makes you long to rush into a McDonald’s, read The Sun, and then have sex with a homeless crack addict lying on the pavement on the way home.

Predictably, Juska feels obliged to mention 11 September, when she was ‘awash with a feeling of hopelessness, uselessness, despair’. And naturally, shoehorned into it all, is an encounter with some Persian women with whom she shares her insights into blokes.

I like Jane Juska. She’s like a teenager. The problem is that I want, at the same time, to kill her. I suspect it’s because I’m single, sixty-two and very English, and I really feel she’s letting the side down.