In America: A Novel - Softcover

Sontag, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312273207 ISBN 13: 9780312273200

Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL, 2001

Synopsis

In America is a kaleidoscopic portrait of America on the cusp of modernity. As she did in her enormously popular novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag casts a story located in the past in a fresh, provocative light to create a fictional world full of contemporary resonance.

In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Poland's greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a "utopian commune." When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, and--as Marina Zalenska--forges a new, even more triumphant career on the American stage, becoming a diva on par with Sara Bernhardt.

In America is about many things: a woman's search for self-transformation; the fate of idealism; a life in the theater; the many varieties of love; and, not least of all, stories and storytelling itself. Operatic in the scope and intensity of the emotions it depicts, richly detailed and visionary in its account of America, and peopled with unforgettable characters.

In America is the winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction.

About this title

Review:

Susan Sontag's In America, which chronicles the travails of a late-19th-century actress, shows Sontag in top time-travelling form and illuminates her motives for glancing so persistently backward. "Almost everything good seems located in the past", she notes in a first-person prologue, "perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born; and one is freer of modern inhibitions, perhaps because one bears no responsibility for the past". There's nothing, it seems, like the age of innocence--a golden moment before we moderns had the curse of self-consciousness brought down on our heads.

It's ironic, then, that In America revolves around a regular paragon of self-consciousness: a brilliant Polish diva named Maryna Zalezowska. The year is 1876, and this Bernhardt-like figure has decided to abandon the stage and establish a utopian commune in California. Not exactly a logical career move, is it? Yet this journey to America does involve a major feat of self-reinvention, for which Maryna may be uniquely qualified. Writing a letter home from the brave new world of Hoboken, New Jersey, she argues against the idea that "life cannot be restarted, that we are all prisoners of whatever we have become". And once she arrives in Anaheim with her husband, child and fellow utopians in tow, she does seem to slough off the skin of her older, European self. She is now that exotic creature, an American, existing in an equally exotic landscape--which happens to elicit some of Sontag's most lyrical prose:

They had never felt as erect, as vertical, their skin brushed by the hot Santa Ana wind, their ears lulled by the oddly intrusive sound of their own footfalls. Hardly anything is near anything here: those slouching braided sentinels, the yucca trees, and bouquets of drooping spears, the agaves, and the squat clusters of prickly pears, all so widely spaced, so unresembling--and nothing had to do with anything else.

Given its subject matter, Sontag's novel is oddly anti-dramatic: she juggles a half-dozen narrative strategies but seldom allows us to sink our teeth into a prolonged scene. Yet she delivers a great many other riches by way of compensation. Her take on the perils and pleasures of expatriation is worthy of Henry James (who actually makes a cameo appearance, assuring Maryna that England and America will morph into "one big Anglo-Saxon total"). She includes a superbly entertaining portrait of theatrical life, culminating in a virtuoso monologue from Edwin Booth that suggests a Gilded Age Samuel Beckett. As always, there is the pleasure of watching the author's formidable intelligence at work, immersing us in the details of a character or landscape and then surfacing for a deep draught of abstraction. Perhaps Sontag is too cerebral to ever produce a straightforward work of fiction. But this time around, anyway, she brings both brains and literary brawn to bear on what Henry James himself called "the complex fate" of being an American. --James Marcus, Amazon.com

Review:

"Often brave and beautiful . . . The scope of the take is vast, and there is a largesse in the telling, the sheer happiness of art. But In America is also an intimate portrait of a willful woman who, like the liner which brings her to America, trails a great wake behind her . . . In this novel about Poland and America, acting and living, transformation and respiration, Susan Sontag has indeed found a story that tells many stories with elan, intelligence and delight." --Richard Lourie, Washington Post Book World

"Sure-footed and wonderfully daring." --Sarah Kerr, New York Times Book Review

"An inventive work, written in fluid prose . . . Beautiful and unsettling." --Lisa Michaels, The Wall Street Journal

"A fascinating exploration of what's real in a culture that preaches authenticity but worships artificiality." --Christian Science Monitor

"Enough incident, psychology, local color, and fascinating detail to stock a flotilla of popular novels, a couple of Ragtimes, and a brace of theatrical memoirs." --Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"What is wonderful about this book is . . . [the] counterpoint of novelist and essayist, of innocence and knowingness. From the knowingness comes another excellence of In America, its cat's cradle of meanings." --Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

"In America displays Sontag in a relaxed, pleasure-seeking mode, guiding her character through a long travelogue in time, specifically the beginnings of the gilded age in the brave new world. Here are sumptuous theaters in Manhattan and hotels in San Francisco; a journey 1,900 feet down into a silver mine in Virginia City, Nevada; cameo appearances by such luminaries as Henry James and the Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth." --Paul Gray, Time

"Like its brilliant essayist author, this 'novel' defies every convention of storytelling . . . Most original and innovative." --Philadelphia Inquirer

"An exhilarating journey into the past, freighted with dazzling detail, the product of an endlessly inquisitive, historical imagination." --The Economist

"Sontag weaves an expansive broad narrative cloth here, keeping us under her spell until the very last word." --Chicago Tribune

"A powerful story of a woman transcending herself . . . Mesmerizing." --Palo Alto Daily News

"[In America] showcases Sontag's gift for cultural commentary and her eye for sumptuous detail." --Denver Rocky Mountain News

"Susan Sontag is a powerful thinker, and a better writer, sentence for sentence, than anyone who now wears the tag 'intellectual.'" --New York Observer

"Sontag crafts a novel of ideas in which real figures from the past enact their lives against an assiduously researched, almost cinematically vivid background." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Alternately hilarious and tragic." --Vanity Fair

"Sontag uses dense, elegant language, inventive dialogue, impassioned monologue, and diary entries to lure the reader more deeply into the fascinating historical journey of a powerful actress . . . Sontag triumphs once again with her gift for turning history into riveting fiction." --Library Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312273207
• ISBN 13: 9780312273200
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 398