SOURCE: "Romance as Metaphor," in The Nation, Vol. 255, No. 10, October 5, 1992, pp. 365-68.

In the following review, Johnson describes Sontag as a skilled storyteller and The Volcano Lover as an insightful novel.

"Collecting," muses Susan Sontag in her latest novel, "is a succession of desires…. To collect is to rescue things, valuable things, from neglect, from oblivion, or simply from the ignoble destiny of being in someone else's collection rather than one's own."

In The Volcano Lover, Sontag has rescued a story locked in many a biographer's prized collection: the tangled fortunes of Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson, whose notorious liaison scandalized eighteenth-century Naples. In a sense, though, Sontag's observations about collecting apply more slyly to herself as a writer. In her revisionist retelling of the Hamilton sage, she's found the ideal forum to display her own succession of desires. For The Volcano Lover is no less than a...