In America
by Susan Sontag
Summary
In 1876 a celebrated Polish actress walks away from everything: the Warsaw stage where she reigns, the partitioned country that has made her a national symbol, the exhausting duty of being Poland incarnate every night. Maryna Zalezowska sails for America with her husband, her son and a small entourage of admirers to found a utopian commune in, of all places, Anaheim, California, where the intellectuals will grow grapes and live plainly and be new people in the new world.
The commune fails, of course, at farming and at plainness, and the novel's second movement is the greater self invention: Maryna, nearing forty, relearns her craft in a foreign tongue, remakes her name for American marquees, and conquers the American theatre so completely that she ends touring the continent in private railcars, playing Camille to miners and millionaires. Around her Sontag arranges the era itself, San Francisco and the boom West, Edwin Booth in decline, Henry James in a walk on, and the two men who share Maryna, her aristocratic husband and the young writer who loves her.
Sontag opens the book with a bravura chapter in which the author herself, at a dinner party in another century, invents the characters in plain sight, and returns throughout to the question underneath the costume drama: whether the self is anything more than its most committed performance.
Around three hundred and ninety pages.
Best for readers who want the immigrant epic run through a mind that cannot stop theorising it, the historical novel as an essay on acting.
Historical Context & Significance
In America won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2000, the biggest literary prize Susan Sontag ever received for fiction, and it arrived trailing an argument: a reader identified passages closely echoing earlier books about Helena Modjeska, the real Polish star on whom Maryna is built, and Sontag's defense, that historical novelists transcribe and transform their sources, became a case study still cited in discussions of fiction's debts.
America's most famous critic and essayist had wanted, late in life, to be read as a novelist above all; The Volcano Lover in 1992 began the campaign and this book, published when she was sixty seven, won it official standing. Reviewers split between those who found the novel of ideas fully alive and those who suspected the essayist had costumed herself in fiction.
Modjeska's actual career, Polish patriot to American star, needed little embellishment. Sontag died in 2004, and the novel stands as the summit of her second, less expected life.