More than any other writer today, Susan Sontag has suffered from bad criticism and good publicity. If she could be rescued from all her culture-hungry interpreters, it might be possible to find the writer who has been made into a symbol. This is no longer easy because a popular conception of her has been rigged before a natural one could develop—like a premature legend…. The standard picture now in circulation is that of the up-to-date radical, a stand-in for everything advanced, extreme and outrageous, for artistic revolt, political disaffection, perversity and that peculiar combination of moral responsibility and moral irresponsibility associated with revolutionary movements—a fusion of Che and Genet. Middle-aged liberals are shocked by her politics and her aesthetics, and loudmouthed moral conservationsists have been accusing her of trying to undermine the good old sexual establishment. On the other hand, a recent adulatory review endowed her...