Volume 39, Number 14 · August 13, 1992
A Moral Tale
By Gabriele Annan
The Volcano Lover: A Romance
by Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 415 pp., $22.00
The Volcano Lover is the story of Nelson and Emma and William Hamilton. Susan Sontag calls it 'a romance' and is intrepid enough to describe the first kiss between Nelson and Emma, 'the fat lady and the short man with one arm.' A frisson of ecstasy comes across; the scene works. And so does the pathos of the whole familiar saga. All the same, I should not call Sontag's book a romance so much as a moral tale, with reflections on many different topics coming out of it like balloons from a cartoon strip. The range of topics is extraordinary: travel, melancholy, painting portraits, telling jokes, the neoclassical versus the modern ideal in art, changes in conceptions of greatness, changes in attitudes to women, environmental pollution, the nature of performance, irony, revolution, mobs, liberal intellectuals and how they don't understand the masses, and collecting.
Review, 3483 words
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