[In the following review, Rollyson judges Sontag's In America as a trite, underdeveloped historical novel.]

In America begins with an epigraph from Langston Hughes: “America will be!” It is a fitting start to the story of a group of Poles who travel to Anaheim, California in 1876 to establish a utopian community. Their leader is Maryna Zaleska, Poland's greatest actress, who has forsaken her career in order to establish a farming commune. She is aware of the likelihood of failure, but the romance of starting anew, the challenge of succeeding where communities such as Brook Farm failed, is too enticing not to pursue. She takes with her a devoted husband, Bogdan; a young son, Piotr; and a young writer, Ryszard, who aspires to win her love.

In a note on the copyright page, Sontag explains that her novel was inspired by the career of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's renowned actress, who did indeed emigrate to America in 1876 and settle in Anaheim with her husband Count Karol Chapowski; Rudolf, their fifteen-year-old son; Henryk Sienkiewicz, the future Nobel-Prize-winning writer; and a group of friends. Sontag insists on the word “inspired,” since she does not follow the historical record too closely. She has allowed herself, she emphasizes, the freedom to invent.

Thus the journey to the new world and the making of a new community are yoked to Sontag's effort to create a new story out of the material of history. I insist on the word “effort” because in the novel's preface, “Zero,” Sontag explores her personal relationship to her characters. She fancies herself a Nathaniel Hawthorne in the Custom House telling his readers how he acquired the scarlet letter.

Sontag once said to Pete Hamill that she would not be able to write a detective novel unless she could first invent the writer writing the story. “Zero” tells us who the writer of In America is. Sontag rehearses a good deal from the interviews she has given over the past thirty years: she grew up in Arizona and California wanting to be, like Marie Curie, a great scientist and humanitarian; her grandparents came from Poland; at eighteen she read Middlemarch and “burst into tears because I realized not only that I was Dorothea but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon” (i.e., Philip Rieff). She has been to Sarajevo (the novel is dedicated to “my friends in Sarajevo”), and thinks of the Poles she overhears talking in a room (she has been magically transported to the past) as precursors of her beloved Bosnians—like the Poles, suffering occupation and partition.

The Sontag narrator of “Zero” appears only once in the novel—and then very briefly. What, then, is the point of “Zero”? It portends some grand link between past and present, author and material that the novel itself never delivers. “Zero” is important only because it is written in Susan Sontag's own voice, and Susan Sontag must be noticed as the writer. In her interviews (conveniently collected in Conversations with Susan Sontag), she is at pains to explain that she became a writer not to express herself, but to contribute to the body of great literature. To be recognized as a writer means more to her than what she writes. Style predominates over content—to apply the terms of her famous essay, “Against Interpretation,” to herself.

Therein lies the problem. Sontag has never come to ground. She dreams of herself as a writer just as she dreams of an America that will be. The America that is has rarely appealed to her, and has usually merited her disapproval. In her essays, she has dismissed most of American fiction, and her comments on American history are about as superficial and ill-informed as those of any writer who has achieved her prominence.

It is very American to think of oneself as being in a constant state of becoming. But to soar one needs a firm launchpad, and Sontag has never been able to see herself or her native land in terms concrete enough to create palpable fiction. In the essay form, her abstract longing for becoming has a certain flair and speaks to a yearning that readers, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, find appealing. The very idea of a “new sensibility”—as she called it in her first book of essays, Against Interpretation (1966)—had a rousing sound to it. Having been there before, however, and with no startling new Sontag work to exemplify the new sensibility, “Zero” lands with a thud.

Reviews of Sontag's fiction often speak of a willed enterprise. She takes her cue from the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran, who advocates a spiritual strenuousness that requires us to “sever our roots” and become “metaphysically foreigners.” Her essay on Cioran perfectly captures her own willed existence. In it, she embraces a thinker who counsels extrication from the world and from domestic commitments in order to experience life as “a series of situations” that leaves the consciousness free to explore its own labyrinth. What Sontag loves most about Cioran is his elevation of the “will and its capacity to transform the world.”

Not surprisingly, then, In America evokes the “power of the will.” While acknowledging her utopian tendencies and her doubts that she will prevail in America, Maryna declares, “I must and I will!” She is reminiscent of the earlier Sontag who weighed the risks of idealizing North Vietnam but then insisted the country deserved to be idealized! Maryna writes to a Polish friend that with a “strong enough will one can surmount any obstacle.” America, Maryna concludes, is a “whole country of people who believe in the will.”

In America fails because so much of it is declaiming without dramatizing. Even Sontag's fabled talent for epigram eludes her here: “passion is a beautiful thing, and so is understanding, the coming to understand something, which is a passion, which is a journey, too.” Banal expressions make the novel a bore.

Only rarely does a character or a scene catch fire, as with Angus Barton, the theater impresario, who auditions Maryna when she decides to forsake her utopia for a career on the American stage. Henry James enters the narrative for a few pages, and Sontag does a nice parody of his style. But her effort to close the novel, as she did The Volcano Lover, with a dramatic monologue is inept, even though the speaker is Edwin Booth. We are invited to measure his anguished, if successful, career against Maryna's faith in the American promise of a new life, but the effort falls flat.

The biggest disappointment is Maryna herself. Sontag mentions in “Zero” how taken she is with divas. She even describes a scene she witnessed between Maria Callas and Rudolf Bing that occurred just as Sontag herself was beginning to establish a reputation in New York. But we learn little from Maryna or from the other characters about what it means to be a diva. Divahood, seemingly, would once have made an ideal subject for a Sontag essay, but she no longer seems willing to exercise the discipline demanded by the genre.

Sontag told a Polish interviewer in Warsaw last year that she had always wanted to write a novel about an actress. Sontag emphasized that she knew a lot about acting, having been in productions Mike Nichols staged at the University of Chicago. But her Maryna, rather like Sontag herself, takes refuge in the aesthetics of silence. Maryna does chatter on about her hopes for America, her attitude toward her husband, son, and lover, and about all manner of subjects—except the one that would engage readers. What does it feel like to be a diva? Her silence abut this matter, like Sontag's, seems almost perverse.

Although Sontag says she felt free to invent in her new novel, much of In America reads like a diligently researched report, replete with quaint passages about what America was like in nineteenth-century New York and the Western United States. Popular novelists like Caleb Carr have done a much better job with similar material, and it is hard to see why Sontag bothered. Without a driving plot, the historical background only makes a static novel more static.

In The Scarlet Letter, the introductory Custom House section succeeds because Hawthorne takes on the burden of the past, establishing his link to the seventeenth century even as he would like, in some ways, to shed its influence. The past was unquestionably an ineluctable part of the novelist and his novel. History was palpable, and it suffused both his style and content. Sontag writes like an exile who believes she can through sheer force of will conjure up the past. The reader soon tires of the novelist as eavesdropper, one who never commits herself to her characters, who in fact seems to feel superior to her creations, since, after all, they are only products of her will.