Books In The Mirror

In America 
Susan Sontag - Farrar, Straus & Giraux

David Kipen 

San Francisco Chronicle 

   The cover photograph of Susan Sontag's new novel, "In America,'' gives us the nape of a woman's neck, the clasp on her string of black pearls and a decorative comb embedded in the whorls of her elaborately coiffed hair. Of her face, we see nothing. 
   Like Miles Davis taking a solo with his back to the audience, the image prefigures a novel that will flirt with, provoke and confound its readers, staying always slightly aloof. Love me or hate me, the coquette says. I'm not doing this for you. 
   "In America'' narrates the story of Maryna Zalezowska, an aging diva of the Polish stage who grows weary of her celebrity and strikes out for the United States in its centennial year, 1876. Modeled on the 19th century actress Helena Modjeska, Maryna means to found a commune -- called a "phalanstery''-- in accordance with the precepts of the French socialist Fourier. 
   Maryna goes to America with a considerable entourage: her husband, an aristocrat with an eye for stable boys; one of her many admirers, a young journalist modeled on "Quo Vadis'' author Henryk Sienkiewicz; her son, Piotr, who goes native in no time flat and soon insists on being called Peter; and a few assorted and somewhat interchangeable hangers-on. 
   Thanks to a chance meeting with Charles Nordhoff, the pamphleteer of "California: For Health, Pleasure, and Residence'' -- and later the co-author of "Mutiny on the Bounty'' -- the immigrants have decided to join the California land rush and create their pseudo-kibbutz in rural Anaheim. It's one of the book's more delicious ironies that Maryna's doomed experiment in utopian socialism takes place hard by the eventual site of another, more successful experiment in utopian capitalism, namely Disneyland. 
   Some of Sontag's best, most lyrical writing crops up during Maryna's Anaheim sojourn. There's an echo of Willa Cather in the sensuality of this passage, where the newly arrived pilgrims split up and wander separately into the desert around their plot: "No landscape, not even the swampy jungle of the Isthmus of Panama, had struck any of them as this awesomely strange. And they were not being borne through it, receiving it as a view, but walking in it, on it, for it was all pale surface, the sky so lofty and the ground so level, and they had never felt as erect, as vertical, their skin brushed by the hot Santa Ana wind, their ears lulled by the oddly intrusive sound of their own footfalls.'' 
   During its Southern California interludes, "In America'' marks a homecoming of sorts for Sontag. From her career as one of America's most dynamic intellectuals, writing for august taste-making journals such as the New York Review of Books and Partisan Review, one might suppose her a lifelong Manhattanite -- a foundling, maybe, discovered in swaddling clothes on the steps of the 92nd Street Y. In truth, Sontag, 67, is the pride of North Hollywood High, born in New York but raised in Arizona and Southern California. 
   Like Sontag, Maryna doesn't stay in Southern California for long. The communards' first solitary forays into the wilderness prove prophetic: Soon almost everybody has splintered off in a different direction, leaving work undone and utopia unrealized. Maryna eventually goes back onstage, making her American debut at the California Theater on Bush Street in San Francisco. 
   This sets the stage for one of the wiggiest denouements in contemporary fiction. It's a gloriously unhinged monologue by American actor Edwin Booth (brother of the more famous John Wilkes) in which he prepares either to ravish Maryna, kill her or merely go over a bit of blocking with her for their touring production of "The Merchant of Venice.'' 
   Most of the book's ambitious themes -- the artist's role in society, the conflicting imperatives of love and career, the unkept promises of American democracy -- come back for a curtain call in this brilliantly theatrical speech, complete with stage directions. But just how it's meant to resolve what's gone before is less a matter for popular newspaper reviewing than for prolonged academic exegesis, or possibly one of those reader contests that landed the book "Masquerade'' atop the best-seller lists a few years ago. Explicate the ending and win $10,000¡ 
"In America'' probably ought to be read twice or not at all. There's that much there, and it's that hard to tease out. As with the dry soil of 1870s California, tenderfeet need feel no shame for wanting to pack it in, but a prodigious harvest awaits those pioneers willing to invest the time. 
   Students of California literature, in particular, may welcome Sontag's scrupulous, often epigrammatic descriptions of a state now largely unrecognizable. "You haven't seen the real America,'' a half-drunk Nordhoff admonishes all who will hear him in a Manhattan tavern. "Get out of New York. Nobody cares about anything here except money. Go out west. Go to California. It's paradise. Everyone wants to go there.'' 
   Even today, Maryna's real-life inspiration, Helena Modjeska, lends her name to a certain Modjeska Canyon near Anaheim. A cursory search of the Internet for further information yields only this ominous link: "Best selection of homes! Modjeska Canyon home loans!'' 
   In California where, in Sontag's lovely phrase, "America has its America, its better destination where everyone dreams of going'' the land rush continues.