In America is an historical novel, yet it is more. It is a novel about identity, about names and words and people who leave their homeland for a new unknown and undiscovered land called America. The novel is one where the stage and all that it represents mirrors life -- a story set near the end of the nineteenth century. On the first page of the novel the motif of the stage is hinted at by how snow flakes seen through a window are described as a "scrim" for the moonlight in the background. The unnamed narrator looks out on the wintry landscape from her vantage point in a warm corner of a large room filled with people. Slowly the narrator, who is Sontag herself embedded in this prelude to the novel, gradually introduces the main characters who are gathered at a private party. These characters include an actress, Maryna the greatest leading lady in Poland; her husband, Bogdan; and a budding writer, Ryszard, who will eventually become her lover.Language is an important aspect of the novel as the narrator meditates on all the words in the air swirling around her at this party. Her meditation leads he to comment that "I mean here only to give these words their proper, poignant emphasis. And it occurred to me that this might explain, partly, my presence in this room. For I was moved by the way they possessed these words and regarded themselves bound by them to actions. . . . I was enjoying the repetition. Dare I say I felt at one with them? Almost. Those dreaded words, dreaded by others (not by me), seemed like caresses. Pleasantly numbed, I felt myself borne along by their music . . ." (p 8) While musing on the Polish diva who holds the company spellbound, Sontag notes: "I remember when I first read Middlemarch: I had just turned 18, and a third of the way through the book burst into tears because I realised not only that I was Dorothea but that a few months earlier, I had married Mr Casaubon... It took me nine years to decide that I had the right, the moral right, to divorce Mr Casaubon." (p 24) She indulges herself and suggests that this will be the story of a Dorothea who does not, like George Eliot's heroine, bury herself in the obscurity of "private" good works. She will shine in the public blaze of celebrity.The party is in Poland, but some converse in French as well. This is their home where they are known and comfortable--yet there is more--ideas are in the air. The narrator hears bits of conversation that hint at plans Maryna has to leave Poland. These words suggest the possibility of a project to create a "perfect" society, one influenced by both Voltaire and Rousseau. After further ruminations on these people surrounding her at the party the narrator decides to write their story: "I decided to follow them out into the world." (p 27)After this unusual introduction the actual story, an historical one, continues for nine more chapters chronicling the journey of Maryna, her close friends, family, and entourage, to America. They fairly quickly settle in a dusty southern California village established originally by Germans, namely Anaheim. Just as earlier communities like Brook Farm in New England and others have failed theirs does as well. The experiment is unsuccessful due to unexpected difficulties as they find the empty and dry expanse of California is not conducive to their plans. While many of them return to Poland it is at this moment that Maryna, longing for a return to the stage, decides to move to San Francisco and mount an American career where she can once again become a leading lady, perhaps a legend. This is, after all, an historical novel and the main characters are based on real people. Maryna is based on Helena Modrzejewska, who at 35 years old was Poland's greatest actress and who emigrated to America. The story abounds with moments when Maryna is in the theater playing Camille or Juliet for adoring audiences. Gradually her stage character takes hold of the reader much as it must have for those audiences. Following her came her husband and her lover, based on the writer Henryk Sinkiewicz (later famous as the author of Quo Vadis, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature). However, not all the real names are changed and , not unlike some other historical novels, famous names drop in from time to time including Edwin Booth and Henry James (later in the story as Maryna has moved on to conquer the London stage; her success there was limited but better by far than that of James whose plays bombed). This is a novel that, according to the author, was inspired by her own family background as all four of her grandparents came from Poland. She herself, in the three years of the novel's conception, frequently visited "besieged Sarajevo" (the novel is dedicated to her friends in that unhappy city). The main character has luminescent moments, but I found the story as a whole uneven. Ryszard and Bogdan both have moments "on stage" but the rest of the characters fade into the background. They all were on stage as followers of Maryna to America and it is a book worth reading to share the experiences of her dramatic and eventful life.
Let me be perfectly clear——I am a huge fan of Susan Sontag's criticism. "Against Interpretation and Other Essays", "On Photography", and "Regarding the Pain of Others" are books I go back to repeatedly for their ahead-of-their-time provocative points of view. After finishing "In America," I feel it's the critical side of Sontag that makes her fiction suffer. The writing is accomplished and refined, and, formally, the constantly shifting points of view rendered through various writing forms such as correspondence letters and real-time theatrical performance proves to be a clever device to push the story along.But how has this tireless champion of the avant-garde produced a novel that feels so old and musty, as if it was from the 19th century, but without the strong emotional and moral conflict that informed the best literature of the time by such authors as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, James, Balzac, etc.? Chapter Zero, with its unnamed mysterious observer/narrator that sneaks into a dinner party, showed promise and piqued my curiosity, but then the novel devolved by having the main characters——who are rather staid, clichéd and uninteresting——take over the storytelling reins. Maybe Sontag intended this to be more of a commentary on the social class issues and bohemian hypocrisies of the time, but I just had no emotional connection to any of these people. The book is well-constructed but has no soul——not surprising, I think, when its written by one of our most celebrated academic thinkers.I also can't help but think that this novel, constructed around supposed historical fact, is some sort of sublimated biographical exploration for Sontag. Every character embodies some facet of her life and personality. Maryna, the star artiste who flees her first marriage for fame and fortune on the stage; Ryzard, the aspiring writer; Bogdan, the dutiful husband wresting with his homosexual tendencies and secret affairs; even the portrait photographer that comes to their Anaheim commune to shoot the group conjures a very Sontag-like discussion of the photographic medium (not to mention could be tagged as Annie Leibovitz-like). But what could have been an interesting exploration of the emotions that drive these characters (and hence Sontag) is too remote, as if the scholar/critic side of Sontag cautioned her fiction writing doppelganger not to reveal too much. So while I appreciate the craft of this novel immensely, I am disappointed that it leaves me so unaffected in the end.
What do You think about In America (2001)?
My fist Sontag.An ambitious read. I really had to hang in there for the first 50 pages, but in the end I'm glad that I did. I'm not likely to be introduced to characters in such a way ever again. I think all of my writer friends should read Chapter Zero and report back to me if that's how it really happens.I just love the idea of moving to a new country, to a new LIFE and lifestyle with a group of friends. I'd do it in a heartbeat. And while that was only the first quarter of the book, it was fascinating to me. I also very much appreciated Sontag's treatment of the stages. Her descriptions of what it means to be part of an ensemble and how it feels to step into a character in the footlights were dead-on.I liked her f;awed characters. I liked selfish Maryna and her (surprisingly) complicated husband figure. I like the alternations between third person narration, journal entries, and author intrusion. I could have done with the 20 page ramble at the end though.
—Nicole
In the 19th century, a Polish actress so brilliant and popular that she is an ersatz national hero, has a mid-career crisis. ?! I was expecting a book about America. Instead I let myself slide into Sontag's introduction in a glittery Krakow dinner party, a dreamy straddle before the story is fully formed. Quickly rewarded -- drawn into this world and this mind of the small band of Polish bourgeois who decide to move to the frontier town of Anaheim to try their hand at communal farming in the model of Brook Farm. The novel continues to tell the story of how they begin to inhabit the desert, then come to grips with their failure as farmers, then embarking on another round of performing life but this time fully American.I fell easily for Sontag's musings on the American west and on the fickle human mind, many of them still true. In some ways it's an interesting counterpart of Stegner's Angle of Repose."Well, you haven't seen the real America. Get out of New York. Nobody cares about anything here except money. Go out west. go to California. It's paradise. Everyone wants to go there.""The soundless, odorless, monochrome landscape , so drastically untenanted, had the same effect on everyone: an intoxicating impression of aloneness, which gradually gave way to a more active assent to the experience of solitude... Their real initiation into the seductive nihilism of the desert had begun.""San Francisco... the steep streets in the heart of the insouciantly planned city.""Because of something you argued the night before, you have something like a moral hangover, but you feel calm because you know now that you're on the right track, while uneasily suspecting that you coudl still think something different tomorrow."
—Michelle
http://wineandabook.com/2012/10/01/re..."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." (page 27)In America is such an expansive piece of fiction, in which Sontag takes on everything from immigration to life in the theatre (with the "re"), and from the nature of love to what it means to be American. And she takes it on with an eloquence most can only aspire to. The novel follows Polish actress Maryna Zalezowska, legend of the stage, as she and her close circle of friends leave Poland and immigrate to America to live the simple commune life. Each chapter varies stylistically, which really showcases Sontag's versatility, and brings new life to many a well-explored theme.I'm sure I have nothing super original to contribute to a discussion of Sontag's work, and given that I've only (yet) read 1 1/2 of her novels (I started The Volcano Lover years ago but for some reason never finished), I did some research post-reading. I highly recommend listening to this podcast over from CBC Radio's Writers and Company from October of 2000. First of all, I had no idea Sontag had such a low, resonant voice. Second of all, she is just such a damned eloquent speaker and so fascinating to listen to.The only part of the book that, initially, didn't really work for me was the last chapter, where Sontag has Edwin Booth go on an alcoholic tirade about life and truth and acting...it just seemed such a sad and almost oppressive way to end the book. But then, during said podcast, Sontag spoke about what was going on in her life when she wrote the last chapter: she said she writes chronologically and was about 30-40 pages from the end of the novel when she received another cancer diagnosis. Now, with that small glimpse into her frame of mind, I can understand where that might have come from and how wrong I was initially. Rubric rating: Duh. 9. I really want to read her nonfiction work on photography.
—Jaclyn Michelle
