SOURCE: McLemee, Scott. “Notes from the Pedestal.” Washington Post Book World (16 September 2001): 9.

In the following review, McLemee expresses his disappointment with the essays in Where the Stress Falls, finding Sontag's approach egotistical and clichéd, and asserting the writing lacks the biting observations of her earlier writings.

Anyone who admires the work of Susan Sontag can only greet the publication of a new volume of her essays with mixed emotions, a blend of hope and worry. Her last collection appeared in 1980. That same year, she told an interviewer in Poland that there were no really great writers in America but that the country did have “ten extremely good prose writers, of which,” she helpfully noted, “I am one.” During this same period she began announcing that she would henceforth spend less time writing criticism, in order to concentrate on fiction—a promise she has, unfortunately, kept.

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