SOURCE: Silverblatt, Michael. “For You O Democracy.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (27 February 2000): 1-2.

In the following review, Silverblatt comments on the disillusionment and Americanization of the characters in Sontag's novel In America.

I

Susan Sontag's new novel is a brilliant and profound investigation into the fate of thought and culture in America. Like Sontag's previous novel, The Volcano Lover, In America masquerades as historical fiction, flaunting the stuff of drama and romance. It is something restless, hybrid, disturbing, original.

At its center is a true story. As Sontag tells us in a prefatory statement, she was inspired by “the emigration to America in 1876 of Helena Modrzejewska, Poland's most celebrated actress, accompanied by her husband Count Karol Chiapowski, her fifteen-year-old son Rudolf, the young journalist and future author of Quo Vadis Henryk Sienkiewicz, and a few friends; their brief sojourn in Anaheim, California; and Modrzejewska's subsequent triumphant career...