Customer Reviews

In America

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

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.

I share the same sentiment that others have expressed: Why did this book receive the National Book Award? From its disconnected beginning, to its rambling stream of consciousness ending, the book lacks cohesiveness, character development, and theme. Even the plot is trite and fails to captivate. One senses that Sontag was rushed in the writing -- perhaps hoping to fulfill a contract? Although she bothers to take some time in the beginning to explore Maryna's desire to retreat to America, her family background, and initial delvings into the theatre; Sontag literally whisks the reader through the middle of the book to its conclusion -- dabbling at Maryna's theatre excursions in San Francisco and her touring trip with her husband. More frustrating is Sontag's constant fluxing of writing style -- from hypothetical letters, to experimental conversation in which she addresses multiple people (upon Maryna's brief return to Poland), to the gibberish of a soliloquy delivered by Edwin Booth.

Ultimately, the book fails to achieve a unified theme. Sontag hints at the destruction of a utopian society, at the strange interworkings of a marriage of convenience, at an actress's chameleonic personality, at the "plight" of the privileged immigrant. However, none of these themes is explored in depth, nor does any one seem to be the author's driving motivation behind the book. Similarly, none of the characters' behavior offers convincing explanation; and therefore, not a single character won my sympathy or understanding.

For a captivating book on immigration to the West, as well as the profound, analytical exploration of two very different people in a marriage, I highly recommend Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose instead. In America is a weak, languishing similitude of that great book, at best.

In America intends to be an "important" act of "literature." It is not. It is not even a good read. In the whole story of Maryna Zalezowska, a Polish actress who emigrates to America with a horde of friends and admirers, fails to found a commune farm, and returns to success on the stage, the only remotely memorable moments are snapshots of local color that are almost digressions from the story itself.

The account of two of the characters' sea passage across the Atlantic, focusing on the contrast between their first-class accommodations and those in steerage, actually is touching. There are descriptions of 19th century New York, early Anaheim, and Comstock Lode silver mining towns that might make a die-hard jingoist shed a tear, not because they are flattering of America, but just because they portray her painted large in all the false glory of the gilded age. The last chapter, a long, rambling, almost humorous monologue by Edwin Booth as he half-heartedly tries to seduce the protagonist by telling her how pathetic a person he is, is worth reading (or maybe that was only my impression because it was the end of the book).

But these highlights are actually digressions from the story itself. The real story, revolves around Maryna, who is terribly uninteresting. She possesses a self-centeredness that enables her to do whatever she wants and entrain those around her in her wake, but when one looks closer to see what aspects of her character this self-centeredness might stem from, there is nothing. No innate charisma beyond being a beautiful woman, no grand ideas other than those lifted wholesale from 19th century French social theorists, no traits of human mobility, as if a present-day purveyor of postmodern literature could condescend to believe in such a thing. By authorial fiat, Maryna is the center of her world, but she lacks the attributes that might enable her to be the center of the reader's.

Since Maryna must be the focal point of the book, on several times another character's subplot is developed just to the point of becoming interesting, only to be promptly aborted. One couple in the commune, Julian and Wanda, have latent marital problems that America brings into much clearer focus. Wanda makes a suicide attempt, and then the characters are shipped back to Poland and mostly forgotten about. Maryna begins an affair with her persistent admirer Ryszard. It turns stale and ends. We discover Maryna's husband Bogdan is sexually attracted to the Mexican farmhands in Anaheim, but this goes nowhere as it is immaterial to Maryna's career, and by extension the book. Basically, the whole novel revolves around an innately uninteresting person, and all other characters must become even more completely two-dimensional to avoid supplanting her.

In America contains nothing worth caring about. It contains a few digressions that aren't enslaved to Maryna's story, and in these digressions, Sontag shows she is capable of writing a much better book. However, she did not do so.

Award winning literature should provoke thoughtful questions. Susan Sontag's "In America" prompted my bookclub to ask: 1) Where the heck was her editor? 2) Was it simply Susan Sontag's turn to win the National Book Award? 3) If "In America" was penned by an unknown author, would it have even been published? 4) Did the guy who was quoted on the back cover actually read the book? Would he please tell us where the "hilarious" parts are? 5) Why did the chapters that were 1 paragraph yet 17+ pages long irritate us so? 6) Does a single interesting premise like "Immigrating to a new country allows you to reinvent yourself" merit 387 tedious pages? and finally 7) Why the heck did our bookclub pick this book?

I have enjoyed the depth of Susan Sontag's lucid, witty essays in the New Yorker magazine, and recently we saw her on Cspan Book -TV. A caller asked what would be the best introduction to her writings, and she suggested her novel "In America."

This book was surprisingly disappointing to me. I kept waiting to get swept up into it, but came to the last page with only a sense of duty for finishing. The characters are drawn well enough ,the time frame (post-Civil War America) is interesting, but the book failed to engage me somehow. Sontag has an affinity for the movies and for actors;she has created as the lead character a Polish actress who finds stellar success on the American stage.

I will continue to enjoy Sontag's essays but doubt I will read another of her novels.

This book is the first I have read by Susan Sontag. But I thought, National Book Award, it must be excellent. I was disappointed, however, when I had to force my way through the quasi-historical prelude to Chapter One. Relieved to make it to the first chapter, at least by now the characters are making sense. I literally force myself to finish this book. None of the characters are appealing, form Maryna, the actress, to her husband, Bogdon, or her lover, Ryszard, all Polish immigrants. Surely the most self-involved of all is Maryna, her main topic of interest being herself and her effect on other people. The plot and sub-plots all revolve around this woman. She dominates the entire landscape of everyone's thoughts. Why? "Frankly, my dear, to borrow a phrase, I don't give a damn." All the historical detail in the world cannot save this book. I also purchased THE VOLCANO LOVER, but after this experience, I think I'll pass both books on to those obsessed with 18th century verbage. Historical is one thing, mind-numbing is another.

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.

You can't ignore the self-consciousness of the author in this book, but in away she deals with this and does away with it in the prologue. The mystery of this book is the borderline between Sontag's consciousness and the protagonists. What it is really about is the violation and domination of the minds of others. Not only is the protagonist an actress as a character but a historical person acting out her consciousness through Sontag's mind. Rather than some mystical conjuring act this is an active method of recreating ideals. The feminine ideal is an endless performer: one who is constantly made-up and at the same time natural. It is this contradiction which is explored in the protagonist's life. Sontag is testing the merge of actor (ficional being) and actual person. The performer is inevitably lost, but paradoxically in this novel the performer is pushed back on stage. Is this where she naturally belongs? This is what you should ask going into In America. It is about ideas concerning identity and its conclusions are highly sophisticated.

This was a fascinating book. Written in Susan Sontag's unique writing style it is a many layered work. It entails a woman's search for her own itentity, the idealism of commune life, the nature of love and much more. We start off with a group of Polish idealists starting up a commune in California with no idea of what they are doing and end up seeing a picture of the theater life in America at the end of the 19th. century. Only a writer with skill like Susan Sontag could pull off a transition like this so smoothly. The only objection I have is the ending---the book simply ends. There are no obvious loose ends hanging, but the story definately lacks a conclusion.

In a long and very public career, Susan Sontag has made a great many pronouncements, and inevitably some have come back to haunt her. Certainly her characterization of the white race as the cancer of history seens like a grandiose bit of breast-beating. But hey, there's no point in beating up on her new novel for a statement she made nearly 25 years ago. "In America" is by no means a perfect work of fiction--to call it a novel of ideas is in fact the highest compliment AND the lowest blow you could aim at it. Yet it's packed with strange and cerebral wonders that only Sontag could dream up. And the protagonist is a truly memorable, realistically erratic diva, who cuts a dramatic (in every sense of the word) swathe across late Victorian America.