7"We thought Susan Sontag was going to be a leading intellectual," complained that incendiary commentator Camille Paglia, "a median link between academe and popular culture. But instead she became a novelist. That's just what we're all waiting for, huh? Another novel by Susan Sontag!"
A cruel dismissal from America's intellectual bootgirl, but we understand a little of such perplexity with this, "another", novel by Susan Sontag and her long-waited follow-up to The Volcano Lover. Despite the lyrically grand title, this is a very straightforward account of the migration to America of a group of middle-class liberal Poles (who else) who plan to set up a commune in Anaheim, California. We have been here a thousand times before; the disenchantment with Old Europe, the arrival in New York - hello, Statue of Liberty - the teeming metropolis and the inevitable, bemused oddities about the strangeness of language. Too often, the characters seem thinly realised and virtually interchangeable, except for Maryna Zalewska, a much loved actress, fawned over by the various, cravat-fondling gentlemen.
What is most surprising about the book is its complete lack of surprise. With Sontag, we might have expected some complexity or twist, some new perspective, but instead we get lots of boiled down historical research and long descriptive passages, full of dream sequences and childhood memories - that bane of modern women's writing. Or any writing where social history and banal psychological insights are dressed up to make a "novel". About the most lively section in the book is the transatlantic passage, where the posh characters make occasional descents below deck to visit the peasant Irish in steerage, but even here the human transactions culminate in scenes of child sexual abuse as "modern" and unconvincing as they are cliched.
However, In America will sell well and probably deserves to. In the realm of so much clunky writing, it reads smoothly and quickly, as a historical drama should. But the publishers do Sontag no service in describing the book, as they constantly do these days, as an "astonishing achievement" and "visionary in its account of America". It is good, escapist stuff, perfect for the holiday, and perhaps more astonishing is that this once much-trumpeted intellectual (possibly too trumpeted, in hindsight) has settled for this kind of cultural commentary.