SOURCE: "Suffering in Silence," in Manchester Guardian Weekly, Vol. 151, No. 14, October 2, 1994, p. 29.

In the review below, Tonkin suggests how themes in Sontag's career contributed to her writing Alice in Bed.

Last year, Susan Sontag defied Serbian gunnery and media mockery to direct Waiting For Godot in Sarajevo. This wasn't just a show of solidarity with a people under siege whose rescuers had failed to turn up. Right at the start of her 30-year career as writer and critic, Sontag argued that the "strenuous modesty" of Beckett and his ilk was more than a fugitive trend. She insisted that their austerity—"the pursuit of silence"—caught the temper of the times as chattier art never could.

Vietnam, fascism, Bosnia, Aids: Sontag has fought the public monsters of our age with conspicuous gallantry. Yet through all her work, in essays and in fiction, persists the figure of a suffering and...