ERICA JONG's new novel is about four generations of women in a Jewish family which is richly endowed in many ways, including ethnic linguistic style and the equivalent of Palgrave's Treasury in Yiddish aphorisms. Her publishers say it is her "most ambitious, complex and satisfying" novel yet. I should contradict them?

I have a hunch it is also meant to be her most symbolic novel. The four protagonists great grandmother down to great grand daughter - all have names beginning with S: Sarah, Salome, Sally and Sara. This has to mean something? Especially since it is the Jewish custom to name babies after deceased relatives, or at least with a name of the same initial? But a mind reader I'm not.

Then there are the significant themes: flight, art, fame. Sarah the emigrant flees in 1906 from the pogroms in Russia to New York, and wrestles her way through an affair with a WASP, tenement life and labour agitation to become a famous portrait painter. She marries a wealthy rogue who owns an art gallery and knows every artist of note in the 20th century. Names, from Picasso on, are mentioned.

Sarah's daughter Salome flees to Paris, becomes a controversial novelist and spends the 1930s - bedding every writer of her era - names again supplied, Henry Miller even quoted in his ardour.

Granddaughter Sally flees her family to become a folk singer, a cult figure of the 1960s right up there with Dylan and Baez. She then flees the world to Vermont to live with the mystic and reclusive author of America's most famous book about adolescence. (This could be some sort of "S" clue?)

Sara, the great grand daughter, flees from both art and fame and becomes a sedate historian. Fate leads her to the Jewish family archives, where she discovers her greatgrandmother's legacy. The book ends, a la Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits, with the same line that opens it as Sara starts faithfully to record Sarah's memoirs.

But what is this precise litany of the century's celebrities about? Are they themselves, or other people altogether? What, oh what, is Erica Jong trying to tell us?

Or could it be merely that she has found four new ways of revealing herself? Erica Jong's first novel, Fear of Flying, was an exultantly bawdy account of a Jewish girl's escape from her repressed marriage. This was the siren song of the 1970s, and the fact that the novel was unfeigned biography only lent added value as it shot to the top of the bestseller list. Unfortunately, she stuck to the groove in subsequent novels, and no one's life is an endless fable for the times that are in it.

Loyal fans will find a lot of characteristic Jongese here: the endless self examination and feminist theorising and exuberant meandering up and down the byways of experience in search of ringing, conclusions about life, death and the whole damned matzo. The old sex is there too, enough to show that Erica is a game girl still, though the practicalities of including so much actual history did have a restraining influence. Menstruation makes only a token appearance with the Jewish slap on the cheek routine; there's only one orgy scene, and that's a fantasy.

But those of us who are not fans must agree that her publishers have a point. This is her best book. Whoever the "S" women are, they tell the story of 20th century America from an authentic and important perspective, a story of pogroms, prejudice, the struggle to survive, the Holocaust, McCarthyism, the era of civil rights and protest. It's a powerful story, told with dignity and feeling. My worst complaint is that it takes days to shake off the Yiddish accent, but enough already. {CORRECTION} 97061700122