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A glorious, sweeping new novel from the bestselling author of The Volcano Lover.
The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag's bestselling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Lady Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson with consummate power. In her enthralling new novel-once again based on a real story-Sontag shows us our own country on the cusp of modernity. In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalewska, Poland's greatest actress, travel to California to found a "utopian" commune. Maryna, who has renounced her career, is accompanied by her small son and husband; in her entourage is a rising young writer who is in love with her. The novel portrays a West that is still largely empty, where white settlers confront native Californians and Asian coolies. The image of America, and of California-as fantasy, as escape, as radical simplification-constantly meets a more complex reality. The commune fails and most of the migrs go home, but Maryna stays and triumphs on the American stage. In America is a big, juicy, surprising book-about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism, about the world of the theater-that will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag's most delicious, most brilliant achievement.
Susan Sontag is the internationally acclaimed author of three novels, a volume of stories, and six collections of essays. In 1990 she received a five-year fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in New York City.
- Sales Rank: #1413002 in Books
- Published on: 2000-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.27" h x 6.31" w x 9.31" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 387 pages
Amazon.com Review
As an essayist, Susan Sontag has tended to stick pretty rigorously to the modern age, whether she's anatomizing the wild world of camp or roasting Leni Riefenstahl over the coals. But in her fiction--particularly in such fin-de-siècle productions as The Volcano Lover--she's clearly felt the allure of the past. And In America, which chronicles the travails of a late-19th-century actress, shows Sontag in top time-traveling form. What's more, it illuminates her motives for glancing so persistently backward. "Almost everything good seems located in the past," she notes in a first-person prologue, "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." There's nothing, it seems, like the age of innocence--a golden moment before we moderns had the curse of self-consciousness brought down on our heads.
It's ironic, then, that In America revolves around a regular paragon of self-consciousness: a brilliant Polish diva named Maryna Zalezowska. The year is 1876, and this Bernhardt-like figure has decided to abandon the stage and establish a utopian commune in (you guessed it) California. Not exactly a logical career move, is it? Yet this journey to America does involve a major feat of self-reinvention, for which Maryna may be uniquely qualified. Writing a letter home from the brave new world of Hoboken, New Jersey, she argues against the idea that "life cannot be restarted, that we are all prisoners of whatever we have become." And once she arrives in Anaheim with her husband, child, and fellow utopians in tow, she does seem to slough off the skin of her older, European self. She is now that exotic creature, an American, existing in an equally exotic landscape--which happens to elicit some of Sontag's most lyrical prose: They had never felt as erect, as vertical, their skin brushed by the hot Santa Ana wind, their ears lulled by the oddly intrusive sound of their own footfalls.... Hardly anything is near anything here: those slouching braided sentinels, the yucca trees, and bouquets of drooping spears, the agaves, and the squat clusters of prickly pears, all so widely spaced, so unresembling--and nothing had to do with anything else. Like every utopia in human history, Maryna's is a failure. Following its collapse, she is moved to return to the theater--but as an American, now, plugged securely into the middlebrow culture of her adopted land. The rest of the novel charts her brilliant career among the philistines, along with a number of heated erotic detours.
Given its subject matter, Sontag's novel is oddly anti-dramatic: she juggles a half-dozen narrative strategies but seldom allows us to sink our teeth into a prolonged scene. Yet she delivers a great many other riches by way of compensation. Her take on the perils and pleasures of expatriation is worthy of Henry James (who actually makes a cameo appearance, assuring Maryna that England and America will morph into "one big Anglo-Saxon total.") And she includes a superbly entertaining portrait of theatrical life, culminating in a virtuoso monologue from Edwin Booth that suggests a Gilded Age Samuel Beckett. As always, there is the pleasure of watching the author's formidable intelligence at work, immersing us in the details of a character or landscape and then surfacing for a deep draught of abstraction. Perhaps Sontag is too cerebral to ever produce a straightforward work of fiction. But this time around, anyway, she brings both brains and literary brawn to bear on what Henry James himself called "the complex fate" of being an American. --James Marcus
From Publishers 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 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From 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.
---Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
78 of 86 people found the following review helpful.
Rich in ideas, disappointing in ending
By Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader
Reading this book is like having someone snatch a particularly juicy feast out from under your nose before you've had the chance to enjoy it properly. "In America" is a rich tale to savor, but slices of it are underdone and it comes to such an abrupt end that the reader is left wondering what happened to the final course.
Starting the novel with an awkward Zero chapter--meant, I think, to better explain the characters--Susan Sontag tells of Maryna Zalezowska, the leading Polish actress of the 1870s, who comes to California to open a utopian commune near Anaheim. The commune quickly fails, and Zalezowska begins the task of reinventing herself as an American actress. She does this brilliantly, and begins a new career traveling across the United States in a private train car performing everything from Shakespeare to the 19th century's favorite sob-fest, "East Lynne."
The sections on how an actress of that age learned and prepared roles, and the insight into nuts-and-bolts workings of 19th century American theater are marvelous, as are the stunning monologue chapters expressing the three main characters' internal and external struggles (the book ends with a devastating monologue by Edwin Booth that is one terrific piece of writing). On the other hand some of the characters are barely sketched and "In America" simply ends. There's no resolution, no sense that the last page of the book should be the last page-in fact, you'll probably turn that page expecting a concluding chapter. And you'll feel cheated.
There's something mean about allowing readers such access to characters' minds and emotions and then chopping the narrative when there is obviously so much to come. Is it that Sontag can't sustain the narrative? The novel reads that way.
It is hard to know how many stars to give "In America." I found much of it fascinating, but felt slighted by the lack of resolution. Yes, even though I know that the real-life model for Maryna, Helena Modjeska, had a long and successful career before retiring to the remote Southern California canyon that still bears her name, I feel robbed of the chance to follow her there, guided by Sontag's masterly hand.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Lazy readers writing unfair reviews
By Eric Maroney
Generally, the reviews of In America here are dazzylingly unfair. Certainly, reading this novel is not like sitting down and watching TV, or even reading the Sunday New York Times. The novel demands that the reader read changes of style, tone, shift in narrative focus, change from letters to first person narrative back to third person narrative, to a sort of interior monologue. What is wrong with this, if it is done with control, as Songtag does, except for the fact it demands that readers fail to be lazy? So, this is not a novel for the easily frazzled. It demands faith from the reader, but rewards the reader for this trust with a deep investigation of what it means to be an American and human.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A Listless Tale That Glides On A Sparkling Smooth Surface
By A Customer
The plot of "In America", Susan Sontag's National Book Award-winning novel, is adumbrated in her introductory note, where she describes the real historical life that inspired the fictional work. In Sontag's words, the novel was "inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son Rudolf, and the young journalist and future author of `Quo Vadis' Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska's subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name of Helen Modjeska." While Sontag strongly emphasizes that the characters and actions depicted in her novel are purely invented (and there is no reason to believe the contrary), the plot largely follows the biography that inspired it.
"In America" begins in a post-modernist fashion, the book's "Chapter Zero" being the first person narrative of a contemporary authorial voice who finds herself coming out of the cold winter of an unidentified Eastern European city, shivering, into a party in the private dining room of a hotel more than a hundred years earlier. There is seemingly a disjunction of time and place. The narrator does not understand the language the people are speaking, "but somehow, I didn't question how, their words reached me as sense." From this point, the authorial voice, the imagination, begins naming the people in the room-in effect, begins creating the characters that will populate the tale to follow-and begins probing the animated conversation she overhears, the snippets of enigmatic dialogue that will gradually accrete into the novel. As the narrator suggests at the end of this Chapter Zero, in words resonant of a theme by Virginia Woolf, "each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head." Thus, in typical Sontag fashion, the novel itself begins with a self-conscious intrusion of theory and authorial presence.
From this interesting and auspicious beginning, "In America" seamlessly glides into the narrative proper, the story of Maryna Zalezowska, a much beloved Polish actress who, together with her husband Bogdan, her son Piotr, her paramour Ryszard, and an entourage of friends and followers, emigrates to America in 1876. Landing in New York, the group spends a brief period living in Hoboken, visiting the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and exploring New York City before embarking on a voyage to the West. After a brief sojourn in San Francisco, they move down the coast to Southern California, where they establish a small settlement in Anaheim. Maryna, the leader of her band of ardent disciples, sees their vineyard and farm in Anaheim as a kind of acting out of Fourieristic ideals, a little Brook Farm of Polish emigrants in the Wild West. Life is hard, however, and the utopian dream soon becomes a dystopic unraveling as Maryna goes back to San Francisco, has a brief affair with Ryzsard and returns to the theater. Her husband, Bogan, remains at the Anaheim settlement until it can be sold and then rejoins Maryna in San Francisco, where she has become an overnight theatrical sensation, her Polish stardom now burning brightly in America.
From this point, the novel becomes almost exclusively the story of Maryna. She changes her name to Marina Zalenska, travels to Virginia City and, eventually, New York City (and even, briefly, London), and attracts fans and admirers wherever she goes. Her life becomes a self-centered, exhaustive tour of America, performing with her own repertory company and making stage appearances with the Edwin Booth, the most renowned actor of the time. Pushing the narrative's other characters into the shadows, Marina Zalenska makes America her own, "In America" being not so much the story of what it was like for a group of Eastern Europeans to emigrate to America, but, rather, the story of Marina Zalenska's personal triumph in America.
Susan Sontag is a brilliant writer, her prose supple and lithe. Reading this book is effortless. Sontag also uses a range of stylistic devices-journal entries, letters, theatrical dialogue, monologue-which make "In America" a fascinating literary construction. However, the quality of the writing does not redeem the listless tenor of the tale or the shallowness of the characters and ideas which Sontag propogates. At one point, Maryna says, "an actor doesn't need to have an essence. Perhaps it would be a hindrance for an actor to have an essence. An actor needs only a mask." Unfortunately, Maryna's view of acting seemingly permeates this novel, the view of the character becoming the practice of the author: the characters and the ideas of "In America" are not essential, but only superficial. Like the post-modernist beginnings of Chapter Zero, the reader only gets a shallow tale, a tale that glides on a sparkling smooth surface with trivial and uninteresting characters; while the writing is easy, the story fails to hold the reader's interest and, hence, the reading becomes difficult and soporific. "In America" is perhaps worth reading, but it is not deserving of the National Book Award.
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