Impressions of a Novel

" IN AMERICA" a novel by Susan Sontag


Many of us are not far removed from the immigrant experience. My family (mother's) migrating from French Canada to the Iowa prairies via Messina N.Y. and settling there before 1856; (father's) leaving Scandinavia over 100 yrs. ago found their way to the "city of big shoulders". This is a familiar shared experience for Americans. Though if I had chosen to respond merely to this theme the significance of the novel would be lessened.

Throughout Sontag's work the theme of immigration is woven into the transformation of character, supported by environment and experience, rather than relying on it in a tautological fashion. After my reading I considered beginning this piece by writing: " It would be fair to say we are all immigrants in a world that exists as much in the imagination as it does in reality. We remain so because we are continually displaced by the flux of change in a moment of personal needs and motives."

As a point of departure Sontag developed a female character inspired by a real life counterpart, the greatest Polish actress of that day. Helena Modjeska left the European stage, and after a less than successful attempt at communal homesteading, returns to the stage becoming the most legendary American actress of the late 18th cen. The most notable of Shakespeareans, greater perhaps than the well known Edwin Booth, who plays along through the last chapter of the novel.

The immigration Sontag conceives is a reaffirmation of actual identity after its own self willed dissolution, a quest for inviolable individuality, that is shaken and rediscovered in a new environment, a reality that is adapted to rather than controlled. It is in this sense that " IN AMERICA" (winner of the 2004 National Book Award) is one of the great feminist novels of recent time. The emerging contemporary women possessing as self a deeper motive for all that social change represents. A masterpiece of writing , attaining to what modern authors have striven toward for the past 200 yrs.