`In America’
In America Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus, Giroux
387 pages, $26
The brilliant essayist and belletrist Susan Sontag takes a break from the modern age, her usual milieu, and returns, in this new novel, to an America on the cusp of modernity. “In America” chronicles the life of a late 19th Century Polish actress, Maryna Zalezowska, who gives up her successful career to start a “utopian” commune in 1876 California. Accompanied by her small son, aristocratic husband and a small band of Poles, Zalezowska gives her dream a go. Like every utopia, it fails, and Zalezowska returns to the stage, Americanized and transformed. But that is far from the end of this richly detailed story. Sontag weaves an expansive broad narrative cloth here, keeping us under her spell until the very last word.
