SOURCE: "Lava Soap," in Time, Vol. 140, No. 7, August 17, 1992, pp. 66-7.

In the following review of The Volcano Lover, Sheppard argues that Sontag uses the novel as a vehicle for discussions of feminism and class.

Long before the U.S. lost its trade balance, it was lopsided with intellectual goods from Europe. Marx, Freud, Sartre and Lévi-Strauss were required cribbing. Books translated from the French and German were best sellers and their authors culture heroes. So were their interpreters. As a critic and novelist, Susan Sontag handled European ideas and forms with brilliance and style. The camera loved her dark good looks, and she became an American knockoff of the Continental intellectual as gravely seductive celebrity. The brain, she said on at least one occasion, is an erogenous zone.

The Volcano Lover, her fifth work of fiction, is a mild cerebral aphrodisiac. It is the sort of book...