SOURCE: "Premature Postmodern," Nation, Vol. 261, No. 12, October 16, 1995, pp. 432-34, 436.

Below, MacFarquhar reviews Liam Kennedy's Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion, a study of Sontag's writings and their historical context.

There are certain poignant little facts sprinkled around us by that novelist in the sky that convey with especial vividness the gulf between past and present. One of these facts is that in the sixties some people considered Susan Sontag to be lacking in seriousness. Listen to Irving Howe writing in Commentary in 1968:

We are confronting, then, a new phase in our culture, which in motive and spring represents a wish to shake off the bleeding heritage of modernism and reinstate one of those periods of the collective naif which seem endemic to American experience…. The new American sensibility does something no other culture could have aspired to: it makes nihilism seem casual, good-natured, even innocent…. Alienation has been transformed...