Sontag: Her Life and Work
(Ecco, $40)
The Susan Sontag we meet in Benjamin Moser’s excellent new biography is difficult to like, said Leslie Jamison in The New Republic. “Selfish and caustic, perpetually self-righteous because perpetually selfloathing,” the legendary critic continually challenges Moser to reconsider the awe he feels for her work. But Moser, whose previous book profiled novelist Clarice Lispector, responds in the best way possible: He takes Sontag’s own demand for directness as an invitation to explore the divide she felt in herself and to argue that her work would have been even stronger if she had revealed more. The strategy works brilliantly, said Lara Feigel in TheGuardian.com. By giving us a life of the late highbrow icon in which Sontag appears to be trying out a series of selves, this 700-page biography “keeps her defiantly alive: argumentative, willful, often right, always interesting.”
Sontag’s story begins with a wounding childhood, said Melissa Anderson in Bookforum. Her father, a New York City fur trader, died when she was just 5, leaving her in the care of her neglectful, alcoholic mother. By her early teenage years, Susan was also anxious about her sexual identity, and in an attempt to turn herself straight wound up having sex with 36 people before, at age 17, she married Philip Rieff, one of her professors at the University of Chicago. For several years, she played the dutiful wife (Moser claims she even authored a book that Rieff took sole credit for).
But shortly after separating from Rieff in