SOURCE: "The Valkyrie of Lava," in The National Review, Vol. 44, No. 17, August 31, 1992, pp. 63-5.

In the review below, Simon questions whether The Volcano Lover is a romance and argues that Sontag focuses too much on her opinions and not enough on her characters.

Two of the most arresting things about Susan Sontag's new book, The Volcano Lover: A Romance, are the title and the subtitle. Why "romance," when to all intents and purposes it looks like a novel? In an interview, Miss Sontag declared that, "to find the courage to write this book," she needed "a label that allowed me to go over the top," as if novelists since Proust, Kafka, and Joyce had done anything less than that. Also, she said, "the novel becomes such a self-conscious enterprise for people who read a lot." Does that mean that habitual novel readers lose their ability to read un-self-consciously...