In America

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
April 2000

The Nobility of Failure

Based in part on the life of the renowned Polish actress Maryna Zalewska, Susan Sontag's long-awaited new novel, In America, is the story of one woman's search for self-transformation, the fate of idealism, and the old and new worlds on the cusp of modernity. A talent rivaling France's Sarah Bernhardt and America's Edwin Booth, Zalewska leaves the Polish stage at the height of her career to found a commune in the arid vineyards of southern California in 1876. Funded by her aristocratic husband and joined by a cast of admirers, including her young son and a promising young writer who is hopelessly in love with her, Maryna looks to the new world for a different and, she hopes, final role. As a self-sufficient woman of what her fellow immigrants call "Hamerica," Maryna hopes to shed her former self and immerse herself in toil and the harsh beauty of an alien land. Or so she tries to believe in page after page of letters home, diary entries, and interior monologues that place the reader firmly in Sontag country. Just as Sontag's previous historical tour de force, The Volcano Lover, threaded its illicit romance through high-minded ruminations on revolution and art collecting, In America takes issues of representation, or as Maryna labels acting, "misrepresentation," as its central concern.

In America, after all, immigrants are free to represent themselves however they like. They may abandon for good "their dark Polish woes." Theymayeven choose to not represent themselves at all. That is the real drive behind Maryna's exile: a desire to live without affectation. Among her fellow commune companions, the fusty, miserable Julian fantasizes about an immersion in America so complete none may ever find him again. The journalist and aspiring fiction writer, Ryszard, believes that America will provide the stories he was born to write. Having promised Maryna never to write about her, he turns his eye to the commune's setting near the town of Anaheim. Inspiration first strikes when a traveling circus's strongman apparently murders the stage manager and absconds with the flying trapeze lady. In Ryszard's version, the two are young lovers, and escape brings them safety. In California's version, however, the two are pursued vigilante-style, and the strongman strung on a tree and hanged.

The difference in these two endings is emblematic of Sontag's theme. The America of the novel offers immigrants a chance for happy endings and a release from class hierarchy. Like other recent utopian experiments, a German cooperative and the nearby religious sect known as "Edenica," Maryna and her band are left alone. Yet isolation and freedom are not tantamount in this layered look at the United States on the cusp of modernity. Socially, America marks people as surely as it brands cattle. For everyone from Mexicans and Native Americans to Asian coolies and even many Eastern Europeans, history dictates endings. As Maryna's dutiful husband, Bogdan, records, "Last week, near Temescal, an Indian laborer entered the privy while it was being used by the rancher's wife and, she claimed, tried to assault her.... The poor fellow was tied up and castrated by the irate husband on the spot.... It seems vile to think, We didn't have to hear this horrifying story." In the repetition of similar tales and in Ryszard's accounts of his vagabond journeys with horse and rifle, Sontag seems to say there's no place far enough away even in the outback of America, Huckleberry Finn's "territories."

Personally, too, America cannot liberate everyone's soul. Some habits persist; some character traits tattoo the soul. And so it is that the commune fails, Maryna returns to the stage, and most of the émigrés return to Poland, bodies, if not dreams, intact. During the commune's inauguration, Maryna compares signing the property deed to a bride on her wedding day marrying the wrong man; it's less the fact of the community's collapse than its slow unraveling that propels the novel forward.

Not everyone throws in the towel. For a few, America unleashes that purer self Maryna constantly contemplates. Bogdan, a gentle and devoted caretaker, plays Leonard Woolf to Maryna's Virginia. He comes to America with no expectations of his own, observing, "The relentless success of these Californians gets on my nerves. I am bred to a distinctively Polish appreciation of the nobility of failure." From moneyed count to subsistence farmer, Bogdan embodies "forbidden desire, straining to be freed by foreignness." Bogdan's conflicting need to be true to Maryna while pining after the young men in the area soon becomes his sole obsession. In the end Bogdan — his name butchered first to "Bobdan" and then to "Bobby" by the local boys he so admires — discovers freedom in a contraption rife with symbolism: the aeroplane a renegade scientist is surreptitiously testing on the California beaches.

In details like Bogdan's love affair with flight, in moments of gritty detail like Ryszard's description of his ferry passage from Europe to New York, and in the set pieces highlighting the late 19th century's changing cultural watermarks, the novel is at its best. When a self-employed photographer arrives in Anaheim, the picture-taking scene at the commune's hodgepodge of buildings stands out in its rich evocation of the time period. The reader imagines the resulting photograph existing somewhere still, perhaps atop Sontag's writing table.

Ultimately, however, In America is really Maryna's tale. She is the novel's triumph and, occasionally, its weak spot. There's something of Anna Karenina in Maryna: weary of her own marvels, crazy for her son but willing to remain apart from him in the name of a stronger hunger, self-aware without always knowing herself. Her musings on how to master favorite plays of the day, from "As You Like It" and "the Scottish play" to the sentimental weepie "East Lynne," together with her critiques of the nature of acting itself, overshadow, both for her and the reader, her commune experience. As a result of this self-absorption, she forms a weak link to other characters. Even her voluminous letters home, significantly, go unanswered. Communication is not a lifeline to a place outside herself but one Maryna throws inward. Sontag is much more interested in plumbing her mind than in putting her to work engaging other characters. She's a fine and complicated companion; she's Sontag whispering, shouting, showing us the grand dramatic production of our shared American heritage.

—Elizabeth Haas

Elizabeth Haas is a writer and critic living in Annapolis, Maryland.

From the Publisher

"Often brave and beautiful . . . The scope of the take is vast, and there is a largesse in the telling, the sheer happiness of art. But In America is also an intimate portrait of a willful woman who, like the liner which brings her to America, trails a great wake behind her . . . In this novel about Poland and America, acting and living, transformation and respiration, Susan Sontag has indeed found a story that tells many stories with elan, intelligence and delight."—Richard Lourie, Washington Post Book World

"Sure-footed and wonderfully daring."—Sarah Kerr, New York Times Book Review

"An inventive work, written in fluid prose . . . Beautiful and unsettling."—Lisa Michaels, The Wall Street Journal

"A fascinating exploration of what's real in a culture that preaches authenticity but worships artificiality."—Christian Science Monitor

"Enough incident, psychology, local color, and fascinating detail to stock a flotilla of popular novels, a couple of Ragtimes, and a brace of theatrical memoirs."—Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"What is wonderful about this book is . . . [the] counterpoint of novelist and essayist, of innocence and knowingness. From the knowingness comes another excellence of In America, its cat's cradle of meanings."—Joan Acocella, The New Yorker

"In America displays Sontag in a relaxed, pleasure-seeking mode, guiding her character through a long travelogue in time, specifically the beginnings of the gilded age in the brave new world. Here are sumptuous theaters in Manhattan and hotels in San Francisco; a journey 1,900 feet down into a silver mine in Virginia City, Nevada; cameo appearances by such luminaries as Henry James and the Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth."—Paul Gray, Time

"Like its brilliant essayist author, this 'novel' defies every convention of storytelling . . . Most original and innovative."—Philadelphia Inquirer

"An exhilarating journey into the past, freighted with dazzling detail, the product of an endlessly inquisitive, historical imagination."—The Economist

"Sontag weaves an expansive broad narrative cloth here, keeping us under her spell until the very last word."—Chicago Tribune

"A powerful story of a woman transcending herself . . . Mesmerizing."—Palo Alto Daily News

"[In America] showcases Sontag's gift for cultural commentary and her eye for sumptuous detail."—Denver Rocky Mountain News

"Susan Sontag is a powerful thinker, and a better writer, sentence for sentence, than anyone who now wears the tag 'intellectual.'"—New York Observer

"Sontag crafts a novel of ideas in which real figures from the past enact their lives against an assiduously researched, almost cinematically vivid background." —Publishers Weekly

"Alternately hilarious and tragic."—Vanity Fair

"Sontag uses dense, elegant language, inventive dialogue, impassioned monologue, and diary entries to lure the reader more deeply into the fascinating historical journey of a powerful actress . . . Sontag triumphs once again with her gift for turning history into riveting fiction."—Library Journal

Michael Silverblatt

Enough incident, psychology, local color and fascinating detail to stock a flotilla of popular novels, a couple of 'Ragtimes' and a brace of theatrical memoirs.

Economist

Vividly inquisitive...An exhilarating journey into the past, freighted with dazzling detail, the product of an endlessly inquisitive, historical imagination.

Michael Pakenham

A tour de force...a magical accomplishment by an alchemist of ideas and words, images and truth.
— (The Baltimore Sun)

Walter Kirn

In America has an invigorating spaciousness...packed with characters, incidents, and color, and combining mass appeal with high intelligence.
— ( New York magazine)

Michael Silverblatt

Enough incident, psychology, local color and fascinating detail to stock a flotilla of popular novels, a couple of 'Ragtimes' and a brace of theatrical memoirs.
— (Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Joan Acocella

What is wonderful about the book is...the counterpoint of novelist and essayist, of innocence and knowingness. From the knowingness comes another excellence of In America, its cat's cradle of meanings.
— (The New Yorker)

Richard Lourie

Often brave and beautiful, occasionally arch and irritating, Susan Sontag's sixth novel is an epic riff of imagination on little-known historical events. .....The books form and theme are elegantly joined.
—The Washington Post

Paul Evans

Susan Santog makes of her novel, In America a brilliant meditation on the Old and New Worlds, the American Dream of the invention of self, and the tension between art and nature. Intellectually satisfying, In America is deftly written!
—Book Magazine, March/April 2000

Michael Pakenham

A tour de force...a magical accomplishment by an alchemist of ideas and words, images and truth.

Paul Gray

In America displays Sontag in a relaxed, pleasure-seeing mode, guiding her characters through a long travelogue in time, specifically the beginnings of the gilded age in the brave new world. Here are sumptuous theaters in Manhattan and hotels in San Francisco; a journey 1,900 feet down into a silver mine in Virginia City, Nev.; cameo appearances by such luminaries as Henry James and the renowned Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth.

Christopher Hitchens

Inspired...In America [is] a counter-romance, alternately hilarious and tragic.

Walter Kirn

[In America] has an invigorating spaciousness...packed with characters, incidents, and color, and combining mass appeal with high intelligence.

Joan Acocella

What is wonderful about the book is...[the] counterpoint of novelist and essayist, of innocence and knowingness. From the knowingness comes another excellence of In America, its cat's cradle of meanings.

TEconomist

Vividly inquisitive...An exhilarating journey into the past, freighted with dazzling detail, the product of an endlessly inquisitive, historical imagination.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As she did in The Volcano Lover, Sontag crafts a novel of ideas in which real figures from the past enact their lives against an assiduously researched, almost cinematically vivid background. Here again her signal achievement is to offer fresh and insightful commentary on the social and cultural currents of an age, with a distinctive understanding of how historical events forged character and destiny. If the story of renowned Polish actress Maryna Zalewska cannot compare in drama to that of Admiral Nelson and the Hamiltons (as a protagonist, Maryna remains somewhat shadowy and elusive), Sontag succeeds in conveying how the political and intellectual atmosphere of Poland and the U.S. in the late 19th century affected her heroine's life. Beautiful, famous and restless at 35, Maryna decides to leave her native land, suffering under Russian occupation. She convinces her husband, Count Bogdan Demboski, her would-be lover, journalist Ryszard Kierul, and various other members of the Warsaw intelligentsia to emigrate to America, where, influenced by Fourier's social philosophy, they will establish an experimental farm commune in southern California. Predictably, the community fails to prosper and falls into debt; idealism gives way to disillusionment; Maryna decides to resume her career, achieving immediate acclaim; and the romantic triangle moves to a new stage. Meanwhile, Sontag makes meaningful associations between a woman's need for freedom and independence, a nation's suffering under a conqueror's heel and the common human quest for "newness, emptiness, pastlessness... this dream of turning life into pure future" that colored many immigrants' views of America. She leads readers into the book via a long, breathless, one-paragraph prologue, narrated as if in a fever dream; indeed, it is not until many pages into the novel that the date and the geographical setting are established. Exemplary at imagining an actor's needs, impulses and sources of inspiration, Sontag also conveys the theatrical world of the time (East Lynne was the most popular play; Sarah Bernhardt reigned in Paris) almost palpably. There are few dramatic peaks and valleys in Maryna's story, but the historical backdrop--with pithy and evocative descriptions of American cities at the turn of the last century, cameo portraits of salty frontier types, and snippets of Western lore--supplies the vigor that the main plot often fails to engender. While this book does not exert the passionate energy of The Volcano Lover, it is a provocative study of a woman's life and the historical setting in which she moves. Author tour; U.K. rights to Jonathan Cape. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

Library Journal

In 1876, 35-year-old Maryna Zalewska, Poland's brilliant, revered actress, packs up her 14-person entourage, including husband, child, maid, and assorted relatives and admirers, and emigrates to Anaheim, CA, determined to shed her glittering life and disappear into the unglamorous anonymity borne of the radical, hard-scrabble work of her commune. After a couple of years, with the failure of the farm looming, Maryna returns to the stage in a dazzling U.S. comeback that rockets her to renewed fame, fortune, and smashing success across the nation and overseas. Basing her new novel on the life of Helena Modrzejewska (stage name Helena Modjeska), Sontag uses dense, elegant language, inventive dialog, impassioned monolog, and diary entries to lure the reader more deeply into the fascinating historical journey of a powerful actress charging her high-energy way through the lives of her inner circle, leaving in her wake broken hearts, inspiration, and a sad inner core that may be forever masked by her inability to separate her actress side from her human one. Sontag triumphs once again with her gift for turning history into riveting fiction (Volcano Lover). Encourage readers to get beyond the annoyingly contrived first chapter with its invisible observer. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/99.]--Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Charles

[A] rich novel...carefully researched, lavishly detailed, and expertly plotted...Sontag is so comfortable spinning [big] ideas through the details of her novel that they never seem heavy or intrusive...Sontag is a brilliant writer...
—The Christian Science Monitor