In America

Rating:
Summary: Complex but beautifully written novel of ideas
Review: I expected to like this novel; Sontag has a wonderful reputation and the storyline had potential. Instead, it became the ONLY book I have ever found so simply awful that I couldn't finish it. The style had an obnoxious quality and the main character was annoying, self-absorbed and tedious. Astoundingly irritating!

Rating:
Summary: a great essayist, but as a novelist....
Review: I have enjoyed the depth of Susan Sontag's lucid, witty essays in the New Yorker magazine, and recently we saw her on Cspan Book -TV. A caller asked what would be the best introduction to her writings, and she suggested her novel "In America."

This book was surprisingly disappointing to me. I kept waiting to get swept up into it, but came to the last page with only a sense of duty for finishing. The characters are drawn well enough ,the time frame (post-Civil War America) is interesting, but the book failed to engage me somehow. Sontag has an affinity for the movies and for actors;she has created as the lead character a Polish actress who finds stellar success on the American stage.

I will continue to enjoy Sontag's essays but doubt I will read another of her novels.

Rating:
Summary: It has some moments of local color, but...
Review: In America intends to be an "important" act of "literature." It is not. It is not even a good read. In the whole story of Maryna Zalezowska, a Polish actress who emigrates to America with a horde of friends and admirers, fails to found a commune farm, and returns to success on the stage, the only remotely memorable moments are snapshots of local color that are almost digressions from the story itself.

The account of two of the characters' sea passage across the Atlantic, focusing on the contrast between their first-class accommodations and those in steerage, actually is touching. There are descriptions of 19th century New York, early Anaheim, and Comstock Lode silver mining towns that might make a die-hard jingoist shed a tear, not because they are flattering of America, but just because they portray her painted large in all the false glory of the gilded age. The last chapter, a long, rambling, almost humorous monologue by Edwin Booth as he half-heartedly tries to seduce the protagonist by telling her how pathetic a person he is, is worth reading (or maybe that was only my impression because it was the end of the book).

But these highlights are actually digressions from the story itself. The real story, revolves around Maryna, who is terribly uninteresting. She possesses a self-centeredness that enables her to do whatever she wants and entrain those around her in her wake, but when one looks closer to see what aspects of her character this self-centeredness might stem from, there is nothing. No innate charisma beyond being a beautiful woman, no grand ideas other than those lifted wholesale from 19th century French social theorists, no traits of human mobility, as if a present-day purveyor of postmodern literature could condescend to believe in such a thing. By authorial fiat, Maryna is the center of her world, but she lacks the attributes that might enable her to be the center of the reader's.

Since Maryna must be the focal point of the book, on several times another character's subplot is developed just to the point of becoming interesting, only to be promptly aborted. One couple in the commune, Julian and Wanda, have latent marital problems that America brings into much clearer focus. Wanda makes a suicide attempt, and then the characters are shipped back to Poland and mostly forgotten about. Maryna begins an affair with her persistent admirer Ryszard. It turns stale and ends. We discover Maryna's husband Bogdan is sexually attracted to the Mexican farmhands in Anaheim, but this goes nowhere as it is immaterial to Maryna's career, and by extension the book. Basically, the whole novel revolves around an innately uninteresting person, and all other characters must become even more completely two-dimensional to avoid supplanting her.

In America contains nothing worth caring about. It contains a few digressions that aren't enslaved to Maryna's story, and in these digressions, Sontag shows she is capable of writing a much better book. However, she did not do so.

Rating:
Summary: Ruminating In America
Review: Once the gassy raconteuse of Chapter Zero has been endured (this device may have been charming in brief, but does not remain engaging for more than a few pages), there is a brief, disorienting feeling of freedom as the unknown frontier of the novel is broached. Unfortunately, this exuberance dissipates immediately.

Not that there isn't a terrific novel hidden In America somewhere.

I can't help but wonder why Sontag chose to tell much of the novel from her female protagonist's perspective, since her male narrators are so consistently vividly imagined and effective, and her female characters are not. A scene in steerage and an excerpt from Maryna's husband's diary are much more provocative than Maryna's musing... since the actress-protagonist is a motivating force and an object of adoration, there really isn't much for her to do besides inspire and wonder. Interestingly enough, this imbalance, this failure of imagination when portraying male and female perspectives, is also evident in The Volcano Lover (a much more fully realized book).

Perhaps the questions Sontag asked herself in writing this book were never satisfactorily answered for (asked by?) the author... or perhaps the book means to evoke the aridity of both failed dreams and success, as well as the narcissism of the theater and the heavy blankness of the American gaze.

Regardless, this is not generally a diverting reading experience, nor is it particularly engaging as a novel of ideas.

Rating:
Summary: Rich in ideas, disappointing in ending
Review: Reading this book is like having someone snatch a particularly juicy feast out from under your nose before you've had the chance to enjoy it properly. "In America" is a rich tale to savor, but slices of it are underdone and it comes to such an abrupt end that the reader is left wondering what happened to the final course.

Starting the novel with an awkward Zero chapter--meant, I think, to better explain the characters--Susan Sontag tells of Maryna Zalezowska, the leading Polish actress of the 1870s, who comes to California to open a utopian commune near Anaheim. The commune quickly fails, and Zalezowska begins the task of reinventing herself as an American actress. She does this brilliantly, and begins a new career traveling across the United States in a private train car performing everything from Shakespeare to the 19th century's favorite sob-fest, "East Lynne."

The sections on how an actress of that age learned and prepared roles, and the insight into nuts-and-bolts workings of 19th century American theater are marvelous, as are the stunning monologue chapters expressing the three main characters' internal and external struggles (the book ends with a devastating monologue by Edwin Booth that is one terrific piece of writing). On the other hand some of the characters are barely sketched and "In America" simply ends. There's no resolution, no sense that the last page of the book should be the last page-in fact, you'll probably turn that page expecting a concluding chapter. And you'll feel cheated.

There's something mean about allowing readers such access to characters' minds and emotions and then chopping the narrative when there is obviously so much to come. Is it that Sontag can't sustain the narrative? The novel reads that way.

It is hard to know how many stars to give "In America." I found much of it fascinating, but felt slighted by the lack of resolution. Yes, even though I know that the real-life model for Maryna, Helena Modjeska, had a long and successful career before retiring to the remote Southern California canyon that still bears her name, I feel robbed of the chance to follow her there, guided by Sontag's masterly hand.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Narative
Review: The best feature of Sontag's novel was the narative style which did not fail to change from Chapter to Chapter. Sometimes it was in an omniscient voice, and other times in the character's own first person narative, in writing and speech, which brought us into the minds and thoughts of the various fascinating Poles in the story. The plot of the story is ineresting in itself to a certain degree, but the idea of leaving Europe and forging a new life in America must have been re-done many times over esp. in the original immigrant literature. The irony of how the Europeans went to America to leave what they were used to behind, to escape the fetters, but seem to pursue the exact same fetters in America is present in Sontag's novel. It also brings out the other ironic element of wanting to do something different and unexpected, but falling into the mold in wanting to form an utopian community which was fashionable at the time. I enjoyed the flow of the storyline and the characterisation of Ryszard as the writer and Maryna as an actress, artists who without art will lose their self, and their use. The first Chapter of the book also leaves one wondering -- was that the author as a persona -- Sontag imagining her characters into play? As a writer would? To see their world, enter it, and develop it? Or was it a neutral observer preparing is for Maryna's plan to leave for America? Sontag's novel of immigration, America, Europe, art, religion and relationships is thought-provoking and a fascinating study. Highly enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: A waste of good paper!!
Review: The designation of "National Book Award Winner" has lost all credibility. What were the criteria for winning? My book club has been meeting for over 14 years and we unanimously voted this book as the worst book we have ever read.

Rating:
Summary: A Listless Tale That Glides on a Sparkling Smooth Surface
Review: The plot of "In America", Susan Sontag's National Book Award-winning novel, is adumbrated in her introductory note, where she describes the real historical life that inspired the fictional work. In Sontag's words, the novel was "inspired by the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband, Count Karol Chlapowski, her fifteen-year-old son Rudolf, and the young journalist and future author of 'Quo Vadis' Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska's subsequent triumphant career on the American stage under the name of Helen Modjeska." While Sontag strongly emphasizes that the characters and actions depicted in her novel are purely invented (and there is no reason to believe the contrary), the plot largely follows the biography that inspired it.

"In America" begins in a post-modernist fashion, the book's "Chapter Zero" being the first person narrative of a contemporary authorial voice who finds herself coming out of the cold winter of an unidentified Eastern European city, shivering, into a party in the private dining room of a hotel more than a hundred years earlier. There is seemingly a disjunction of time and place. The narrator does not understand the language the people are speaking, "but somehow, I didn't question how, their words reached me as sense." From this point, the authorial voice, the imagination, begins naming the people in the room-in effect, begins creating the characters that will populate the tale to follow-and begins probing the animated conversation she overhears, the snippets of enigmatic dialogue that will gradually accrete into the novel. As the narrator suggests at the end of this Chapter Zero, in words resonant of a theme by Virginia Woolf, "each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head." Thus, in typical Sontag fashion, the novel itself begins with a self-conscious intrusion of theory and authorial presence.

From this interesting and auspicious beginning, "In America" seamlessly glides into the narrative proper, the story of Maryna Zalezowska, a much beloved Polish actress who, together with her husband Bogdan, her son Piotr, her paramour Ryszard, and an entourage of friends and followers, emigrates to America in 1876. Landing in New York, the group spends a brief period living in Hoboken, visiting the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and exploring New York City before embarking on a voyage to the West. After a brief sojourn in San Francisco, they move down the coast to Southern California, where they establish a small settlement in Anaheim. Maryna, the leader of her band of ardent disciples, sees their vineyard and farm in Anaheim as a kind of acting out of Fourieristic ideals, a little Brook Farm of Polish emigrants in the Wild West. Life is hard, however, and the utopian dream soon becomes a dystopic unraveling as Maryna goes back to San Francisco, has a brief affair with Ryzsard and returns to the theater. Her husband, Bogan, remains at the Anaheim settlement until it can be sold and then rejoins Maryna in San Francisco, where she has become an overnight theatrical sensation, her Polish stardom now burning brightly in America.

From this point, the novel becomes almost exclusively the story of Maryna. She changes her name to Marina Zalenska, travels to Virginia City and, eventually, New York City (and even, briefly, London), and attracts fans and admirers wherever she goes. Her life becomes a self-centered, exhaustive tour of America, performing with her own repertory company and making stage appearances with the Edwin Booth, the most renowned actor of the time. Pushing the narrative's other characters into the shadows, Marina Zalenska makes America her own, "In America" being not so much the story of what it was like for a group of Eastern Europeans to emigrate to America, but, rather, the story of Marina Zalenska's personal triumph in America.

Susan Sontag is a brilliant writer, her prose supple and lithe. Reading this book is effortless. Sontag also uses a range of stylistic devices-journal entries, letters, theatrical dialogue, monologue-which make "In America" a fascinating literary construction. However, the quality of the writing does not redeem the listless tenor of the tale or the shallowness of the characters and ideas which Sontag propogates. At one point, Maryna says, "an actor doesn't need to have an essence. Perhaps it would be a hindrance for an actor to have an essence. An actor needs only a mask." Unfortunately, Maryna's view of acting seemingly permeates this novel, the view of the character becoming the practice of the author: the characters and the ideas of "In America" are not essential, but only superficial. Like the post-modernist beginnings of Chapter Zero, the reader only gets a shallow tale, a tale that glides on a sparkling smooth surface with trivial and uninteresting characters; while the writing is easy, the story fails to hold the reader's interest and, hence, the reading becomes difficult and soporific. "In America" is perhaps worth reading, but it is not deserving of the National Book Award.

Rating:
Summary: Awards Books!...Bah! Humbug!
Review: This National Book Award Winner is the story of a famous Polish actress who emigrates to the United States in 1875, with her husband, child, and an entourage of friends and would-be-lovers to start a new and idyllic life for themselves on a commune farm located near the German settlement of Anaheim, CA. They are artists, writers, actors, and nobility who fail at farming in the hot, dry climate they chose to cultivate. Maryna Lezowska (real life Helena Modrzejewska) changed her name to Marina Zalenska (real life Helena Modjeska) returned to acting and began a triumphant career in America. Called the `Countess' as a publicity ploy because of her marriage to a Polish count, Marina became famous across this country and astounded audience after audience with performances of Portia and Lady Macbeth, two among many roles she portrayed. I was amazed by her memory. She performed one arduous role after another, a different play every night of the week, but the heroines sounded so similar: How could she remember which one she was doing? What a repertoire! As Sontag's story unfolds we are treated to America and Americans through the eyes of a brilliant woman of the 19th century. At the end we enjoy a visit from an alcoholic Edwin Booth as he soliloquizes re his life, a famous actor-father, Shakespeare, and the brother who killed Lincoln. We see America embrace theater; a thorough, insightful, picture of America in a bygone era. I found this journalistic, historical novel ... very boring for the most part. Certainly not a page-turner. Another disappointment of works picked to receive an award.