Volume 47, Number 7 · April 27, 2000
Going West
By Diane Johnson
In America
by Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 387 pp., $26.00
A time traveler draws us into an imaginary gathering on a winter's night in nineteenth-century Poland. As Italo Calvino (or Anthony Trollope or George Eliot) might have done, the author reminds us that the characters we will meet are inventions of her own, that we are in a fiction arising from her own interests, her knowledge and ideas, her past. Moreover, certain details of the speaker's own biography ('I grew up in southern Arizona and southern California,' 'I'd spent a good part of three years in besieged Sarajevo,' 'all four of my grandparents were born in [Poland]') remind us of the author herself, Susan Sontag. She explains that she is simultaneously inventing and describing the scene—'What writing feels like is like following and leading, both, and at the same time.'
Review, 2143 words
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