SOURCE: Wood, Michael. “Susan Sontag and the American Will.” Raritan 21, no. 1 (summer 2001): 141-47.

In the following review, Wood analyzes the depiction of self-determination in In America, noting that many of Sontag's theories on society, American culture, and human will are apparent in the novel.

For Roland Barthes photographs were announcements of mortality, “imperious signs” of future death. The characters in Susan Sontag's new novel feel the same but at the moment of being photographed, not when they contemplate the result. And what dies for them is not a self but a project, a hope. In the very act of photography, one character writes—we are in California in 1876—there is “a kind of foreboding. Or regret—as if we were taking the first step toward accepting the eventual failure of our colony, by making sure that we would have in our possession an image of what we are...