SOURCE: "Wild Fancies," Belles Lettres, Vol. 9, No. 3, Spring, 1994, pp. 25-6.

In the following review of Alice in Bed, Lewis argues that Sontag fails to bring her characters to life and concludes that the best part of the book is the afterword in which Sontag explains her intent.

"How wild can be the fancies of the unimaginative female!" the bedridden Alice James wrote in her diary in 1891. Unfortunately, wild, self-indulgent fancy rather than quickening imagination is the guiding spirit of Alice in Bed, Susan Sontag's play based on Henry and William James's invalid sister. Intended as a play "about women, about women's anguish and women's consciousness" and about the imagination, Alice in Bed is in fact little more than a procession of emblematic figures uttering portentous, clipped sentences at one another. Rather than bring the historical and fictional figures to life on stage, Sontag exploits them for all the...