SOURCE: Birkerts, Sven. “Fiction in Review.” Yale Review 88, no. 4 (October 2000): 158-62.

In the following review, Birkerts contends that In America lacks dramatic tension and character plausibility.

“In place of a hermeneutics,” wrote Susan Sontag in 1964 at the conclusion of her essay “Against Interpretation,” “we need an erotics of art.” It may have been the first arresting formulation in what has become a venerable career of pronouncements and instigatory postures, not to mention achieved works of prose in diverse genres. Through it all—and because of it all—Sontag has made herself into one of our very few brand-name intellectuals. She is striking, memorable, the bearer of the standard of high seriousness in a culture that has essentially capitulated to the easy lifting of the ironic mode or the ready clasp of pure entertainment.

This early pronouncement serves us as an immediate point of departure, not least because of...