SOURCE: "Love and Death in the Shadow of Vesuvius," in Washington Post Book World, August 16, 1992, pp. 1-2.

Below, Byatt praises The Volcano Lover as intelligent and provocative.

It is difficult to imagine anything more resolutely anti-romantic than Susan Sontag's "Romance," The Volcano Lover. It is set in late 18th-century Naples, in the shadow of Vesuvius. Its main characters are the Cavaliere, an English diplomat, his beautiful second wife, and the Hero, a visiting admiral who becomes the lover of the wife. They are, of course, Sir William Hamilton; Emma, Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson, perhaps always slightly absurd as romantic figures, but here so remorselessly cut down to size that Sontag's icy irony becomes a kind of passion that in turn generates a strange affection for her struggling manikins.

The world of the novel is constructed of glittering descriptions of people, events and things, all considered with the...