SOURCE: Postlewaite, Diana. “Scene Stealer.” Women's Review of Books 17, no. 9 (June 2000): 5-6.

In the following review, Postlewaite maintains that In America is not only a superbly written historical novel, but that Sontag's characterization of protagonist Maryna provides insight into Sontag's mind and personality.

In 1992, critics were surprised and readers delighted when Susan Sontag, formidable essayist of the au courant, published The Volcano Lover, a romantic historical fiction set in late eighteenth-century Naples. And now she's done it again: a nineteenth-century tale based on the true story of Polish actress Helena Modrzejewska, who emigrated to a farming commune in Anaheim, California, in 1876 and subsequently became a darling of the American stage.

Sontagians have made much of this writer's later-life new beginnings, her protean self-reinvention (qualities she shares with the heroine of her latest fiction). But Susan Sontag's avant-garde postmodernism and her old-guard historicism, her fierce intellectualism and her equally...