[In the following review, Elgaard finds flaws in the narrative style in The Volcano Lover, yet compliments Sontag's characterizations, and especially the development of the protagonist, Emma.]

Set in revolution-threatened, late-eighteenth-century Naples and subtitled “A Romance,” The Volcano Lover casts a net of passions: a British envoy's for Vesuvius, his first wife Catherine's for him, his own for second wife Emma, and finally hers, requited, for Admiral Nelson. Crisscrossing the net run other loves: the collecting envoy's for art; the starving mob's (as is the king's hunting lust) for butchery; that of the queen's confidant, Scarpia, for power. The storyteller (of ancient origin, now termed “postmodern”) freely manipulates and interrupts action—even letters!—in comments witty, scathing, and wistful, tightening the net till there is scarcely room for the reader. Deliberate tense shifts—often in midsentence—may serve artistically, like filmic stills (the momentous moment), but also irritate as mere mannerism.

Forestalling character delusions (“Catherine may have thought, wrongly, that she had escaped male egoism”) or coloring reader reception (“What we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive—a wisdom and a brand of felicity unavailable to the Collector which he would never miss”) may be mock-Victorian, but any such intention is vitiated by tahsome impact. Led by the nose, and mostly within earshot of Vesuvius—variously androgyne, monster, principle of disaster, projection of ourselves (even willed identification)—we soonest see the connection between humanity's lust for destruction (spectacle at all cost) and appropriation: both are “appetitive.” A wholly negative cuneiform is the cuccagna, an obscene, live mountain of terrified animals built to entertain and feed the poor on feast days; and equally Swiftian is the inverted(?) volcano of the King's protracted bowel movements.

Preachily explicit on the societally oppressed, as in many a feminist dictum, the novel yet triumphs in its portrayal of Emma. Related to mythical Galatea (and Balzac's Sarrasine story), she is statue come alive, endearing and empowering herself through sheer vitality. Fat and faded, she meets her one-armed, one-eyed hero, and in a marvelous “funhouse” full of Bacchanalian statuary, they kiss. With their separate imperfections they attain perfect passion: “She never imagined that a man could feel as she did—that he wanted to be taken by her as much as she by him. We are all, in that best sense, little volcanoes, even Jack the monkey, whom the Collector mistakenly saw as “co-mocker” (versus embracer) of life and who died for lack of affection—to be resurrected “sitting on my breast” in the envoy's death delirium, a reminder of failure.

Since obsession is here defined as the opposite of ecstasy, even the martyred intellectual Eleanora, who comes to judge all posthumously, must, in her desire to be “pure flame,” be seen as having failed; the sybil Efrosina, whom the Collector sought and feared as the erotic connection to life, remains (with Emma) closer to the pulse.