In America

A truly entertaining book that kept me captivated. I enjoyed Sontag's use of different writing styles to convey the many characters through the story.

Generally, the reviews of In America here are dazzylingly unfair. Certainly, reading this novel is not like sitting down and watching TV, or even reading the Sunday New York Times. The novel demands that the reader read changes of style, tone, shift in narrative focus, change from letters to first person narrative back to third person narrative, to a sort of interior monologue. What is wrong with this, if it is done with control, as Songtag does, except for the fact it demands that readers fail to be lazy? So, this is not a novel for the easily frazzled. It demands faith from the reader, but rewards the reader for this trust with a deep investigation of what it means to be an American and human.

Susan Sontag's National Book Award winning "In America" is a beautifully written but complex - if not difficult - novel of ideas. Boasting some of the most gorgeous prose ever committed to print, it is bursting with heartfelt yearning and promise for the future as it traces the path taken by the celebrated stage actress Maryna and her community of friends, who embittered by their history of colonisation by the Russians, chose to leave Poland in the late 19th century to build a utopian commune in America. Their grand agrarian experiment to rediscover the vitality of simple living and return to basics fails. Due to lack of experience or otherwise, Maryna's commune comprising scholars, writers, painters and their families, breaks up and some of them return to their former lives in Poland. Maryna herself, after a brief period of self imposed exile returns to active professional life and quickly establishes herself as a celebrity once again but this time in her newly adopted country. "In America" raises a whole cache of fascinating ideas. It contrasts the inherent cynicism and corruption of old world values with the innocence, optimism but also shallowness of new world morality. Sontag's ambitious novel starts off promisingly, using an unnamed female narrator who then mysteriously disappears, never to show up again. The narrative then segues seamlessly into a penetrating and fascinating peek into the Polish soul. Using a blend of shifting perspectives, the experience is both insightful and mesmerising. But when the utopian commune breaks up, some of the magic in Sontag's writing also evaporates. Certainly I found the final 100 pages or so a little pedestrian. The use of a jumble of literary formats including letters, poems, rotating confessions, etc also gives a slightly disjointed and unstructured feel to the book. The concluding section featuring a soliloquy by Edwin Booth emerges from nowhere to close the book ! Talk of abrupt endings. However, the high points were so absorbing I was too far away in seventh heaven to notice or mind. "In America" is an outstanding literary achievement. It may not make easy reading but it'll repay your effort many times over. Don't miss it !

You can't ignore the self-consciousness of the author in this book, but in away she deals with this and does away with it in the prologue. The mystery of this book is the borderline between Sontag's consciousness and the protagonists. What it is really about is the violation and domination of the minds of others. Not only is the protagonist an actress as a character but a historical person acting out her consciousness through Sontag's mind. Rather than some mystical conjuring act this is an active method of recreating ideals. The feminine ideal is an endless performer: one who is constantly made-up and at the same time natural. It is this contradiction which is explored in the protagonist's life. Sontag is testing the merge of actor (ficional being) and actual person. The performer is inevitably lost, but paradoxically in this novel the performer is pushed back on stage. Is this where she naturally belongs? This is what you should ask going into In America. It is about ideas concerning identity and its conclusions are highly sophisticated.

In a long and very public career, Susan Sontag has made a great many pronouncements, and inevitably some have come back to haunt her. Certainly her characterization of the white race as the cancer of history seens like a grandiose bit of breast-beating. But hey, there's no point in beating up on her new novel for a statement she made nearly 25 years ago. "In America" is by no means a perfect work of fiction--to call it a novel of ideas is in fact the highest compliment AND the lowest blow you could aim at it. Yet it's packed with strange and cerebral wonders that only Sontag could dream up. And the protagonist is a truly memorable, realistically erratic diva, who cuts a dramatic (in every sense of the word) swathe across late Victorian America.