[In the following review, Wood analyzes the depiction of self-determination in In America, noting that many of Sontag's theories on society, American culture, and human will are apparent in the novel.]

For Roland Barthes photographs were announcements of mortality, “imperious signs” of future death. The characters in Susan Sontag's new novel feel the same but at the moment of being photographed, not when they contemplate the result. And what dies for them is not a self but a project, a hope. In the very act of photography, one character writes—we are in California in 1876—there is “a kind of foreboding. Or regret—as if we were taking the first step toward accepting the eventual failure of our colony, by making sure that we would have in our possession an image of what we are now.” A few pages earlier another character thinks of a photograph as both “evidence” and “a relic”; proof for the future that the present will have existed. Why would they need proof? Why wouldn't memory and their senses be enough? One answer is that these characters are “in America,” as the title of the novel says, in a place so prone to hope that time and reality seem to be effects of the will rather than material measurements or resistances. The photograph doesn't create this mythology or the concurrent anxiety about it, but it does crystallize the perception, display its secret kinship with defeat and melancholy.

In America is a historical novel which is also a subtle and complex meditation on America as the land of the will. More precisely, as a land where the will is not so much a presence or a force as the object of a collective act of faith, “a whole country of people who believe in the will,” as the central character suggests. The same character, a page or so later, recognizes “the old American tune, which conflates willing strenuously and taking for granted.” The singer of the tune in this case is Henry James, imagining he is more English than he is, taking himself for English because that is what he wants to be. “Henry James was very American after all,” our heroine concludes. “He'd contrived to have at his disposal a vast allotment of willing.”

Who is this expert on the American will? She is a Polish actress, and it's important to remember that this novel is mainly peopled by Europeans, and that virtually all of its many fine reflections on the idea of America come from them. It's also important to remember that the expert on the Polish actress and on the European view of America is an American novelist, Sontag herself, fully present in this text as an imagining and reimagining mind. America is not a fantasy or an illusion in such a framework, but it is doubly dreamed as well as geographically real. It's a European idea, as its name suggests; but not only a European idea. There are Americans who have forgotten Europe, and there are Americans who never knew it. And there are Americans, Sontag's intricate fiction suggests, who need to keep starting out again from Europe in order to arrive in their own history and their own present time.

The novel begins “Irresolute, no, shivering, I'd crashed a party in the private dining room of a hotel.” The party is taking place in Warsaw in 1876, but the gate-crasher already knows about Maria Callas and 1960s New York and the “besieged Sarajevo” of our day. She doesn't understand Polish (“I was in a country I'd visited only once, thirteen years ago”), but she picks up scraps of meaning from the conversations she hears, and she tells us something about herself. “For it should be mentioned, why not here, that all four of my grandparents were born in this country (hence, born in a country that had ceased to exist some eighty years earlier), indeed, born around the very year to which I'd traveled in my mind in order to co-inhabit this room with its old-timey conversations, though the couple that engendered me were quite unlike these people, being poor unworldly villagers with occupations like peddler, innkeeper, woodcutter, Talmud student.” The narrator also tells us that she has “tried conjuring up a hotel dining room from the same era in Sarajevo, and failed,” and more intimately that she first read Middlemarch at the age of eighteen and cried “because I realized not only that I was Dorothea but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon.”

Our narrator clearly much resembles our novelist, but we should pause over the careful descriptions of her activities. She travels in her mind, she tries to conjure up. “These people” are not her people, they are Polish aristocrats and artists and intellectuals, and there is a difference between a mental journey to a remembered place and the same journey to an imagined place, and still another difference between either of those trips and a journey to a place which is both actual and imagined, both documentable and dreamed. I hear the voice of Salman Rushdie reminding us (in Midnight's Children) that “reality can have a metaphorical content,” and Sontag's narrator comments shrewdly and elegiacally on the same topic:

The past is the biggest country of all, and there's a reason one gives in to the desire to set stories in the past: almost everything good seems to be located in the past, 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, sometimes I feel simply ashamed of the time in which I live. And this past will also be the present, because it was I in the private dining room of the hotel, scattering seeds of prediction. I did not belong there, I was an alien presence … but even what I misunderstood would be a kind of truth, if only about the time in which I live.

The compelling truth here seems to be the felt shame of the present. The innocence of the past is perhaps not entirely an invention but it is inseparable now from the fallen time it precedes and rebukes. What speaks in a nostalgia “for every era before I was born” is not the historical imagination but a lyrical scorn for the writer's own day.

But the historical imagination is at work here too. The well-known historical events of the period are alluded to very discreetly. There is an American financial panic “of three years ago”; there is the “ignominious defeat” of General Custer “early this summer.” And there is the less recent assassination of President Lincoln “by a deranged actor, as you'll recall.” The deranged actor is the younger brother of a more famous actor, Edwin Booth, who is given a long soliloquy (a conversation in the form of a brilliant monologue) at the close of the novel, which rests in all its major details on further historical events which are not exactly unknown. The Polish actress Helena Modrzejewska, her name later shortened to Modjeska, emigrated to America in the late nineteenth century, founded a utopian colony in California, and became the age's most famous stage diva, rivaled only by Sarah Bernhardt. She was accompanied to America by her husband and her son and her friend and lover the writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, later to become known as the author of Quo Vadis. Sontag's novel is “inspired by” these travels and these figures, she says, “no less and no more.” The historical Modjeska becomes the fictional Maryna Zalezowska, shortened to Zalenska; her husband, the count, is Bogdan; her son is Piotr; Sienkiewicz is Ryszard. We even watch the writer handing out these names—“yes, I know it could have been Helena, but I'd decided that it would be, or must be, Maryna,” “I ruled that he could not be a Karol, that I had misheard his name, and gave myself permission to rechristen him Bogdan.” The point, I take it, is not only to express the liberty of fiction to rework and complement history, but to remind us of fiction's haunting by history, the substantive, continuing existence of what is there to be reworked.

In America takes us from Zalenska's Warsaw to her rural retreat in the Tatra mountains; follows the outriders of her community across the Atlantic as they explore possibilities for settlement in America, and decide on Anaheim in California; traces Maryna's own travels from Hoboken through the Panama Canal; describes the start-up and ongoing life and abrupt failure of the community; and chronicles in rich detail Maryna's return to the stage, including a visit to Poland and a tour in England, complete with conversation with Henry James. The last sentences of the book record Edwin Booth's hatred of improvisation, and strike the same complicated note about history and reality and their alternatives. “An actor can't just make it up,” Booth says to Maryna. “Shall we promise each other, here and now, always to tell first when we're going to do something new? We have a long tour ahead of us.” They may be actors and have a long tour ahead of them, but they are also versions of the historical novelist. They will do something new, but they won't just make it up.

Maryna didn't want to feel like a child, even as a child, and certainly not when she was an adult. “It was partly so as not to feel like a child, ever, that she had become an actress.” To be a child, in this perspective, is to be vulnerable, prey to parents and memory and your old submissive habits. An actress, in the same perspective, is something like an American as the novel thinks of this brave creature, an instance of perpetual self-invention. And to become an American actress, having been a Polish one, is to carry the sense of an always renewable world to extreme lengths. To be an American, Ryszard thinks at the beginning of his voyage, is “to be free to think yourself something you're not (not yet), something better than what you are.” Bogdan writes in his journal: “In Poland I thought that I was what I had to be. America means one can strive with fate.”

This is very traditional, and familiar, and a long way from the bitterly negative America Sontag evokes in Styles of Radical Will and elsewhere. But the ideology has its cracks. Would the equation of actress and America mean that America never felt like a child, however much its inhabitants might boast of their innocence and claim to think like children? Even America, Ryszard thinks, “has its America.” If Poles dream of New York, New Yorkers dream of California. The deferral of the dream evokes Langston Hughes, and sure enough, there he is, in the epigraph to the whole novel: “America will be!” That sounds positive enough, but gets a little gloomy if the future is always somewhere else, and gloomier still if the “will” in that sentence expresses effort or even desperation as well as tomorrow's tense. “America is supposed to repair the European scale of injury,” Bogdan writes, “or simply make one forget what one wanted, to substitute other desires.” The supposed repair seems a little remote, and just forgetting what one wanted isn't the most dynamic form of the American dream. “In America,” Bogdan writes again, thinking now of the faltering utopian community, “everything is supposed to be possible. And everything is possible here, abetted by the American inventiveness and the American talent for desecration. America lived up to its part of the bargain. The fault, the failure, is ours.” What happens is different from what's possible, in America or anywhere else, and the very idea of possibility can become a reproach, a source of shame about the actual.

“Every marriage,” Maryna thinks, “every community is a failed utopia. Utopia is not a kind of place but a kind of time, those all too brief moments when one would not wish to be anywhere else.” This is not just European pessimism, or a Polish taste for martyrdom, which are amply celebrated and mocked within the novel. It is an evocation of America as neither repair for injury nor substitution of desire nor sheer bland possibility but as something that can be constantly sought but scarcely ever found. Early in the novel Maryna believes firmly in “the power of the will,” in what she calls the “utopian” idea “that everything we wish can be obtained,” and she achieves a considerable amount of success in this vein. But she realizes that charm and persistence and charisma are not the same as wishing, and begins to think that will is “just another name for desire.” In other words, there are two very different kinds of will to be invoked. One is the planning, originating desire, the one that seeks and finds means for its fulfillment. This is what gets Europeans to America, and gets anyone, Europeans or Americans, to achieve anything at all. Then there is the other, lonelier, powerless evocation of the will, which represents lingering desire without any hope or means of fulfillment, since all we have is the willing itself, supposed to be capable of magically turning thought into action, of unilaterally taking the place of all the now broken instruments of desire.

When Americans conflate “willing strenuously with taking for granted,” they are using the second kind of willing to disguise the absence or failure of the first. And when they are said to “believe in the will,” both senses of the word are in play. Americans believe in wanting things and getting things, Sontag is suggesting, but they are not sure how much they have to do beyond the wanting. Ryszard is described as “one of those extremely intelligent people who become writers because they cannot imagine a better use of their watchfulness,” and the narrator says something very similar about herself and her notion “that steadfastness and caring more than the others about what was important would take me wherever I wanted to go.” “I thought if I listened and watched and ruminated, taking as much time as I needed, I could understand the people in this room, that theirs would be a story that would speak to me.”

Watchers see all kinds of sights, of course, but in this novel they register two things above all. First, America is a place infiltrated with ideas which keep threatening to take it out of place, and out of time, although it can't finally escape history's clutches. Second, the will is a fiction which moves many facts around, which can't be ignored and can't be believed in. The watcher finds these insights in the large country of the past, but the territory is easier to enter than to bring up to date. “I don't consider devotion to the past a form of snobbery,” one of the characters says in a story in Sontag's I, etcetera. “Just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.” In America displays the same unrequited love, but converts it into utopia, the place we can't go beyond and don't wish to leave. The vision is alluring, and Sontag is suggesting we need both to understand its appeal and to shake it off. It is not a style of radical will but rather the reverse: a longing for a historical time when wishing was an option, and for the fantasy time when wishing was enough.