SOURCE: Nelson, Deborah L. “Public Intellectual.” Women's Review of Books 19, no. 1 (October 2001): 4-6.

In the following review, Nelson examines the changing tones amongst the essays collected in Where the Stress Falls.

You showed that it was not necessary to be unhappy,” Susan Sontag writes in “A Letter to Borges,” “even while one is clear-eyed and undeluded about how terrible everything is.” Sontag's new collection of essays, Where the Stress Falls, drawn from her work of the past twenty years championing artists, art forms and causes, salvages tremendous comfort from acute disappointment. Her idiosyncratic moral aestheticism, which provokes the Left and the Right in this country, sets the terms for the collection, providing the grounds of her esteem for artists in a wide variety of media and her disillusionment with her fellow intellectuals. For the “barely closeted moralist,” as she describes the younger self that wrote Against Interpretation (and...