Sontag’s systematic violation of fiction’s First Commandment–show, don’t tell–widens that distance still further. If deliberate, it seems perverse; if not, it suggests that, despite her formidable intelligence–and four previous books of fiction-she’s an amateurish novelist. “The Cavaliere does not see how he is already viewed as a famous cuckold,” Sontag writes, when his wife’s affair with Nelson becomes known, “neither is the hero able to see what he has become in the eyes of others.” A more artful novelist would scorn to say this outright, and instead contrive scenes to dramatize it. Conversely, the scenes Sontag does dramatize–a drunken Emma dancing the tarantella at a staid London dinner-merely demonstrate what she’s told us: they seldom advance the novel by themselves, and nothing much comes of them. How did Emma feel the morning after? Did her husband think the worse of her? What happened next? Sontag seems not to have entered into her characters’ world enough to have asked herself these elementary novelistic questions. As if to compensate for the lack of true dramatic tension, she goes for the stagy, the emblematic: the first adulterous kiss takes place in a hall of mirrors.
But for every big, dumb move like this, there’s half a dozen small, smart details. Hamilton’s beloved Vesuvius is a bore when it’s a symbol of rage, sexuality or revolution. But it comes alive when he must cross a flow of “grainy orange” lava and is amazed to find he doesn’t sink if he keeps moving: “It was like walking on flesh.” We learn that the British painted the decks of their ships red to hide the blood that would be spilled in battle, and we watch the stump of Nelson’s arm, lost during the 1797 attempt to capture Santa Cruz de Tenerife, “thrashing in his empty sleeve” as he talks. No one has described better waking up out of a nightmare: “She punched her way up through the roof of sleep and surfaced on the bed, panting, drenched in sweat.” And in Sontag’s most moving scene, the crucial prop is a simple cup of coffee–a woman’s last request before she is hanged for her role in the short-lived Neapolitan republic. It “burned my tongue when I tried to sip it. I put it down, ignoring the ferocious stares at the door… I lifted the bowl to my lips once more and, alas, the coffee was tepid enough to drink.”
Sontag doesn’t truly start novelizing-as P. G. Wodehouse put it, “filling the customers with pity and terror”-until she’s down to her last 60 pages. Then, in five almost perfectly pitched monologues, the characters speak to us directly: the dying Cavaliere, his two wives, Emma’s mother and, finally, the executed republican woman, who damns them all from beyond the grave for being blinded by privilege and indifferent to the suffering that’s the lot of most humans. Sontag’s decision to give the last word to an articulate and persuasive enemy of her main characters shows why she kept her distance so long: she understands them too well and respects them too little. To have entered into their hearts sufficiently to write in their voices is a brief, belated triumph of the novelist over the essayist. It’s almost worth the wait.
