Susan Sontag arrived at her present intellectual eminence with the publication of her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation (1966), a consideration of such chic cultural phenomena as happenings, the nouveau roman, French movies, and camp. In the title essay of that book, she argued for a radical new approach to art, one in which the emphasis would be on form rather than content. Interpretation, she declared, was "reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling" (note the list of adjectives, a characteristic mannerism); the important thing was to "recover our senses … to see more, to hear more, to feel more."

At the time, this essay, like the book as a whole, was seen as a liberating force, a romantic rallying cry for the avant-garde to emancipate art from the shackles of fusty meaning. But for all its surface glitter, there was something peculiarly sterile in the kind of romanticism Sontag espoused. In its way, it was a debased reworking of the esthétique préçieuse of Walter Pater, that guru of the English Decadence, and like Pater's exhortation to "burn always with [a] hard, gem-like flame," it proved to be something of a dead end.

Yet in her criticism over the years, Sontag has remained largely faithful to that early creed, in the sense that she does not perceive her function as one of uncovering meaning; her essays do not plunge into the depths so much as skate imperiously over the surface. The work of interpreting, with its connotation of a journey toward revelation, obliges the critic to pursue a line of reasoning, construct an argument; this Sontag has never done. She proceeds, in her criticism, not by argument but by assertion, delivering a series of judgments and pronouncements to which the reader is expected to submit without question. For all her defense of various types of freedom, hers is a curiously dictatorial voice.

Now, however, [in The Volcano Lover] Sontag has written a novel that would appear to be a grand departure from all her earlier work—her stylized experimental fiction as well as her acclaimed nonfiction. Not only does she call it a romance, but she was at some pains to make clear, in an adulatory article about her in the New York Times Magazine, that writing this book was an act of pure love—no sort of intellectual exercise whatsoever. Certainly, those reviewers who have enthused over the novel in the pages of Vanity Fair and elsewhere have expressed delight at the incongruity of her subject: the famously scandalous, early-19th-century romance between Lady Emma Hamilton, flamboyant young wife of the elderly British envoy to the Court of the Two Sicilies, and Lord Horatio Nelson, England's greatest naval hero. We are meant to understand that there is something particularly endearing about such a rigorously postmodern intellectual expending her talents on this old-fashioned historical subject.

And the story is indeed a colorful one, rich in comedy as well as pathos. Emma, the exuberant daughter of a village blacksmith, was originally sent to Sir William Hamilton in Naples as a bribe, or so it was said: a profligate nephew of Sir William's, unable to pay his debts to his uncle, shipped off his pretty young mistress instead. When she arrived in Naples, accompanied by her illiterate mother, Sir William—a widower thirty-six years her senior, a fastidious aesthete and art collector, as well as the volcano lover of Sontag's title (he made over twenty ascents of Mount Vesuvius while in Italy)—set about having her tutored in gentlewomanly subjects like music and Italian and art. She would dance and sing for his guests, dress up in elaborate costumes and strike "attitudes" based on mythological figures; a shameless flatterer, a bit of a drunk, she was endlessly gossiped about by the visiting English, while the normally reticent William openly adored her.

Twelve years after Emma's arrival, Nelson showed up in Naples, ill and exhausted, having just lost his arm and suffered a head wound in battle; Lady Emma and her mother nursed him back to health, and he began going about everywhere with the Hamiltons, the three of them singing one another's praises. It was the only time that Nelson neglected his duties, or his wife at home. According to the hand-wringing English version of the story (at least until the revisionist movie of 1941, That Hamilton Woman, starring Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh), Emma was a sorceress who bewitched the great man, and was to blame both for his idleness and for the uncharacteristic ferocity with which he put down a republican uprising in Naples. (The normally kindly Nelson issued summary orders for the execution of the aristocratic republicans.)

The Hamiltons and Nelson then returned to England together; after Nelson's final break with his wife, the three even shared a house, from which Emma's and Nelson's daughter was spirited away hours after her birth, in order to spare Sir William's feelings. The lovers presided jointly over Sir William's deathbed, and then lived together openly in the rare intervals when Nelson was not off at sea battling Napoleon's navy. On the eve of the Battle of Trafalgar, he wrote a will pleading with his king and countrymen to look after his dear Emma and their daughter in the event of his death—a request they conspicuously ignored, while erecting countless monuments to his memory.

This is the story Susan Sontag tells—a romance, indeed. But the technique she employs in the novel is curiously similar to that of her criticism: despite the inherent drama of the narrative, the book proceeds less as a series of events and encounters than as a string of verdicts and summations, observations and pronouncements. And again, there is no attempt to plumb the depths, to reveal the characters' inner lives.

Indeed, the characters remain amalgams of superficial mental traits, occasions for aphorism: "A star, unlike an actress, always wants to be recognized." "A hero is one who knows how to leave, to break ties." But unlike Montaigne's epigrams, or even Oscar Wilde's, Sontag's have no ring of truth; they are maxims in search of a meaning. (Would it not sound just as convincing to say, "A hero is one who never breaks ties, who always returns home"?) This is minimalist fiction presented in maximalist fashion, elaborating endlessly on its themes without ever heading for the interior.

In dealing with Sir William, for example—and the first third of the book is largely taken up with describing "the Cavaliere's" daily life before the arrival of Emma in Naples—we get dozens of passages like this:

The collector's impulse does not encourage the lust to understand or transform. Collecting is a form of union. The collector is acknowledging. He is adding. He is learning. He is noting.

For all the rhetorical flourishes, the wisdom-dispensing tone, this is just portentous hot air. (Indeed, it sounds less like Proust than like Joan Didion on a bad day. "Boca Grande is. Boca Grande was. Boca Grande shall be." Etc.) And nowhere do we get a depiction of Hamilton's immediate sensations as he makes an acquisition—the one thing that might have brought us to empathize with this figure at least briefly, to feel something toward him other than supercilious detachment.

But if Sontag never allows Sir William to breathe, she is infinitely kinder to him than to Nelson—always referred to in the book as "the Hero." So in fact he was known in England, where even today pubs all over his native Norfolk still carry signs of him bearing that legend. Sontag, however, uses the epithet in a purely sarcastic sense. Of all the judgments rendered in this novel, none is more righteous or more final than the condemnation of Nelson's conduct during the Neapolitan revolt—if there is one thing bound to provoke Sontag's leftist ire, it is the suppression of a republican uprising. Yet her portrayal seems tinged with a certain personal spite as well.

Perhaps Sontag is affronted by the sheer roast-beef Englishness of Nelson (she is a great lover of all things French), or perhaps the virtues he possessed—fierce courage, a high degree of independence—are simply outside her sphere of interest. There are no elegant discriminations to be made about physical bravery; one can only feel a certain humility before it, and that Sontag is incapable of—just as she is incapable of showing us what might have gone on in the mind of someone like Nelson when he was standing on deck with cannonballs whizzing around him; or climbing into a ship unaided, his shattered arm dangling at his side, after stopping his small boat to pick up wounded crew members floating in the water.

Emma fares much better here. Not only does Sontag seem to approve of her more than she does of the others—presenting her as a generous spirit rather than the slut of English morality tales, and as a victim of various injustices perpetrated on females in a male society—but, toward the end of the book, she even gives us a glimpse into Emma's consciousness, unmediated by the narrator's insistently knowing voice. In a brief, moving scene, as Emma is dancing in a drunken frenzy before Sir William's horrified guests, Sontag suddenly gives her a voice of her own—wild with sorrow and defiance, ardent in just the way Emma ought to be. For almost the first time, the novel comes alive. Later still, Emma's ignorant, doting mother takes over briefly to tell the story in her own words, and once again we actually feel the presence of a live human being.

But in the end, apart from some vivid images of street scenes in Naples, of a rampaging mob, of Sir William's pathetic pet monkey, and of Emma dancing, the strongest impression one takes away from this book is of the suffocatingly humorless presence of Susan Sontag.

She has become by now a virtual icon of Mind, the ultimate "glamorous intellectual," as Vanity Fair puts it. Yet her chief strength may lie in nothing much more than the ability to assume a voice of authority at all times. In the case of The Volcano Lover, what this produces is a solemn rather than a serious novel, in which portentous observations are made in the tone of someone offering a glimpse of the Holy Grail.