In America - Hardcover

Sontag, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374175403 ISBN 13: 9780374175405

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2000

Synopsis

Poland's greatest living actress leads a utopian community to the wilds of 1876 California, where she will struggle to maintain love, hope, and idealism in the harsh reality of the American West.

About this title

Reviews

Often brave and beautiful, occasionally arch and irritating, Susan Sontag's fourth novel is an epic riff of imagination on little-known historical events.... The scope of the tale is vast, and there is largesse in the telling, the sheer happiness of art.

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.

Once past its odd, sluggish opening, and not yet as far as its final scene, a reader finds much to enjoy in Sontags highly researched fourth novel (The Volcano Lover, 1992, etc.). It's a fictionalization of the American experience of celebrated Polish actress Helena Modrzejewska (here named Maryna Dembowska): first, as queen of an entourage that includes her family and her lover (Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz, called here Ryszard Kierul) and that joins a farming commune in California; next, as center star on a spectacularly successful extended tour that begins in Nevada (making miners weep) and ends in New York and London; then as working partner with American thespian Edwin Booth, another of the many men who threw themselves at her feet. Marynas epic story begins as a speculation hatched in the mind of a nameless woman narrator who, accidentally observing a private party in a hotel dining-room, conjures up the histories of its evidently foreign-born participants. The tale, thus begun, assumes several forms: a straightforward narrative of the move from embattled Poland to America as undertaken by Maryna and her second husband, Count Bogdan Dembowski, her three children, and several friends (notably, her importunate lover Ryszard); second, scenes from these and other characters viewpoints; third, Marynas letters home to her admiring physician friend Henryk; fourth, Bogdans diary, recording both his passive deference to Marynas wishes and his fleeting homosexual impulses; and finally, strangest of all, a monologue addressed by Edwin Booth to his new stage partner, the triumphant Maryna. The heart of the story is Sontags account of Marynas conquest of America: a wonderfully ironic, episodic chronicle of culture shock that includes a wittily described meeting with Henry James (who, its implied, will immortalize Maryna in The Tragic Muse). Lamentably shapeless. Yet, though Sontag may not be a novelist, really, she enlightens and entertains in what becomes, against rather long odds, a surprisingly lighthearted and likable book. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374175403
• ISBN 13: 9780374175405
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 387