Serenissima

As in Fanny (1980), Jong returns to another century - this time the 16th, for an American actress' rendezvous with William Shakespeare - but this current offering is a pointless-seeming, only sporadically entertaining fantasy, marred by heavy-handedness and florid prose. Forty-three-year-old American film star Jessica Pruitt shows up in her most loved city in the world - Venice - to act in a fantasy based on The Merchant of Venice: she's to play Shylock's daughter, also named Jessica. But while waiting for her brooding Swedish director to get it all together, she comes down with a fever and is magically transported back to Venice's 16th-century Jewish ghetto - where now she's playing Shylock's daughter for real. And who should show up but William Shakespeare himself, on a bit of a vacation with his patron, the brutally lecherous bisexual Earl of Southampton. It's love at first couplet, though it's difficult to understand why: Will is quite a wimp, always quoting his own stuff, insecure because he hasn't made it yet, extremely jealous of Kit Marlow ("If only I could write like that!"). Jessica even has to slyly suggest the plot of Antony and Cleopatra to him: "What a subject for a tragedy!" muses Will. There's much more in this vein, but at least - unlike Jong's castrated 20th-century males - the Bard is pretty hot stuff in the sack ("We were caught up in a sort of natural disaster, an act of God, a shipwreck, a typhoon," etc.). Then Will saves the life of an illegitimate child (born to a nun), and together he and Jessica journey to have the infant (Judah) circumcised, but they are set upon by a howling, anti-Semitic mob (who come across as extras from a Frankenstein movie) and barely escape. In the end, Jessica dies of the plague - and awakens in the 20th century, with little Judah still by her side. An essentially humorless, unconvincing fantasy that alternates uncertainly between farce and tragedy, and finally sinks beneath the inertia of Jong's literal-minded, relentlessly 20th-century sensibility. (Kirkus Reviews)