[In the following review, Spalding finds that Sontag's essays in Where the Stress Falls appear pessimistic concerning the state of current arts and society, and deems that Sontag is at her best when indignantly taking an unpopular stance on issues.]

Susan Sontag is America's most successful woman of letters, but she is also, right now, in a curious position, unable to please either the right or the left. Ten days after 11 September, the New Yorker carried an article by her in which she fired off at the “sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days”. To her, it seemed “unworthy of a mature democracy”. There followed howls of rage. Although much of what she said echoed opinions being voiced in British newspapers, she was labelled an intellectual crank and a detractor from American solidarity.

Meanwhile, her relations with left-wing academics continue to deteriorate. Writing as she does for the common reader and from an untheoretical position, she is regarded as a magisterial exponent of a literary mode that is amateur and outmoded. She, in turn, has scant respect for today's academy, which she lambasts in this new book [Where the Stress Falls] for using ideas “devoid of common sense or respect for the practice of writing”. Her recent transformation into a successful novelist (The Volcano Lover has been translated into 20 languages) may have aggravated the situation. Academics, always so conscious of positioning, are suspicious of anyone with Sontag's range, and tend also to prefer the safety of tenure to the dangers and discomforts of Sarajevo under siege.

However, few would deny the influence that her first collection of essays, Against Interpretation (1966), had on radical thinking about modern culture, or, in what followed, how stimulating she could be, on Aids and illness, the pornographic imagination, drugs, authors and literary theorists, photography, dance, film and theatre; even when the reader disagreed with her arguments or conclusions. Her insights also made her influential among those involved with the creative and performing arts. As she herself once said of her chosen art form, an essay can be as much an event, a transforming event, as a novel or a poem. But this new collection, written over the past 20 years, strikes a somewhat doleful note. At times, it seems that what is on offer is less a transforming experience than a jeremiad.

Nevertheless, many will find this book hard to resist. It is wrapped seductively in a painting by Howard Hodgkin (who is the subject of one of these essays), and it offers a fresh opportunity to enter Sontag's mind and share her curiosity, enthusiasms and pleasures. The now familiar manner, which Elizabeth Hardwick once described as the “liberality of her floating, restless expositions”, at first disguises the tenacity of Sontag's thought. Because, although she finds much to praise, the underlying burden of these essays is a protest at the degradation of culture in the capitalist world of today.

Evidence of this can be found both on screen and in books. In the essay “A Century of Cinema”, Sontag, who once said her life could be divided into two—before and after her discovery of Jean-Luc Godard—recounts the love affair with films which made her an incorrigible cinephile. But whereas cinema once seemed to her quintessentially modern, accessible, poetic, mysterious, erotic and moral, it is now a decadent art form, engaged in an “ignominious, irreversible decline”. Literature fares no better. Alongside the “implacable devolution” of literary ambition, she notes “the concurrent ascendancy of the tepid, the glib and the senselessly cruel as normative fictional subjects”. The question asked by the Polish writer Adam Zagajewski at a Danish university in 1998—“Is literary greatness still possible?”—must have reverberated in her mind, for it became the opening sentence of her lead article on W G Sebald in the Times Literary Supplement, which is reprinted here. It is also one of the main themes of this book.

Her recurrent emphasis on “greatness” and “seriousness” is out of step with contemporary issues, and will irritate cultural relativists. It also casts Sontag in the role of cultural priestess. All of this will invite dispraise, inevitably. She insists, however, that critics cannot ally her with George Steiner and other professional mourners of the death of high art; the breadth of her interests supports this claim. Her thought chimes best with present-day concerns in her constant brooding on the significance of memory. “All writing is a species of remembering,” she argues, in her essay on Sebald, whom she admires for the “passionate bleakness” of his voice, his lament and mental restlessness. She continues: “The recovery of memory, of course, is an ethical obligation: the obligation to persist in the effort to apprehend the truth.” Elsewhere, her understanding of the role of memory in Hodgkin's art makes her his most percipient commentator. She is also the first to link his paintings and his passion for collecting and travelling with the artist's gratitude for that which is not himself, “the world that resists and survives the ego and its discontents”.

What saves her in places from a higher form of grumbling is her radicalism and eloquence. Take, for instance, her description of “the tide of indecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents which has washed over and bitten into the façades of monuments and the surfaces of public vehicles in the city where I live—graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, but most of all simply an assertion: the powerless saying, I'm here, too”. Elsewhere, she detects a political conservatism behind the new cultural populism.

At times, it feels necessary to resist her recurrent sense of mourning and loss. It informs “The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)”, which builds on how Europhilia has been a significant ingredient in her work since the 1960s. What gave an interesting slant to her appreciation of European culture was the American consciousness she brought to it. But her Europe cannot be elided with the economic issues and challenges that have surrounded the adoption of the euro, nor with Euro-festivals, Euro-exhibitions. Euro-journalism and Euro-television, all of which Sontag dismisses as kitsch, mere parodies of art and literature. Europe, for her, is a collection of standards—a legacy derived from the “diversity, seriousness, fastidiousness, density” of its culture. This, she claims, provides her with a reference point, a mental ground from which to explore the world.

Sontag does not ignore the ways in which this ideal has at times been hideously perverted, used to promote an idea of Europe that augments power and suppresses or erases cultural differences. There is nevertheless a lack of balance in her threnody for a shrinking Europe, a Europe of “high art and ethical seriousness, of the values of privacy and inwardness and an unamplified, non-machine-made discourse”. She cites the films of Krzysztof Zanussi, the prose of Thomas Bernhard, the poetry of Seamus Heaney and the music of Arvo Pärt. “That Europe still exists,” she concludes, “will continue to exist for some time. But it will occupy less territory. And increasing numbers of its citizens and adherents will understand themselves as émigrés, exiles and foreigners.”

Is this conclusion the product of “seriousness”? Or the outcome of a romantic idealism that has petrified into received opinion? It left me wanting to protest the ingenuity of rap, the versatility of much present-day animation, the notion of pilgrimage in relation to football matches, and the gains assimilated from the American language. (“Why look how sappy it is, full of juice isn't it, real live growing stuff,” as Stevie Smith wrote in the 1940s.) But Sontag is always a step ahead of her readers and, with a sudden twist at the end of her essay on the idea of a fading Europe, consoles us with a story about Gertrude Stein. When asked if, after 40 years residing in France, she was worried about losing her American roots, Stein replied: “But what good are roots if you can't take them with you?”

Ultimately, so Sontag concludes her essay on American fiction, “it's where the stress falls”. With this new collection, neither the stress nor the place where it falls will find universal favour. But the tug and flow of Sontag's ideas is irresistible, and nowhere more so than in the essay that follows her account of war-torn Sarajevo, where she directed a performance of Waiting for Godot. Titled “‘There’ and ‘Here’”, it reveals her at her angriest and best, her activism to the fore as she indicts intellectuals for making so little response to the Bosnian war.