Sontag Finds New Style for '90s

Volcano Lover: A Romance by Susan Sontag $22.00, from Farrar, Strus and Girous Publishers

A historical novel based on an 18th century love affair between Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson seems an unlikely subject for Susan Sontag. But the essayist, cultural critics and author of the famous "Notes on Camp" and the 1969 book Styles of Radical Will has recently written a historical novel of ideas.

"What's original about this novel," Sontag said in an interview with The Crimson, "is not the ideas as you would boil them down to a sentence or two, but rather the way they are elaborated and the way they are organic to the narrative." This is true, but readers of her earlier work will find themselves looking for the social criticism and clever observations that made Sontag so famous.

Volcano Lover: A Romance, Sontag's first book in 25 years, focuses on Sir William Hamilton (Sontag calls him the Cavaliere throughout the book). Cavaliere is the British ambassador to Naples, a rabid collector of potpourri and vulcanist who married his first wife Catherine for money. After Catherine's death, the Cavaliere falls in love with Emma; through a strange twist, however, she turns around and finds love in a young British admiral.

The book is filled with descriptions of European travel, war casualties and musings on the psychology of republican revolutionaries. The writing is pure Sontag--strong, reflective, and intellectual. Unfortunately, it shows little sign of the ingenuity of her earlier work. Indeed, Sontag seems eager to divorce herself from the essays which made her so famous.

"I don't want to repudiate the earlier work, but it is totally remote to me," Sontag insists. She has steadfastly become a high modernest in a post-modernist world. "I feel this was the book I was born to write. And I wish it were my first book. "I feel this was the book I was born to write. And I wish it were my first book... I'd much rather write this kind of book than anything else I've written."

The novel is good, but it's not Sontag at her best. Though she shuns it, the temptation to contrast Volcano Lover with her earlier work is irresistible. Sontag--the same woman who was influenced by the novels and plays of Batille and Artaud and the philosophy of Sartre, Camus, Lukacs, Barthes and Canetti--has turned her back on the present by ignoring the history of her work.

Like Rachmaninov, the stubborn composer who used 19th-century models for his music, Sontag is a willful anachronism and has never been accepted by critics and academics. Unlike Rachmaninov, however, it is doubtful that Sontag's Volcano Lover Work will be embraced by the general public. Now the novelty, the taboo topics have vanished from Sontag's art; a shadow of the pioneer of the '60s has settled into his book.

The Sontag of the 60's was an observer and analyst of the avant-garde, a cultural critic that showed us ourselves. She always learned toward the esoteric. Who would have guessed a generation of trendy academics would make the formerly well-known story of Sir William Hamilton obscure?

More historical novels are on the way. Sontag has a four-book contract with her life long-time publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She has plans to start her next novel in December at the conclusion of her book tour. Her only comment: It was that it will be set in the 19th century.