The Many-Sided Sontag

For what, will Susan Sontag be best remembered? “It’s not clear what, in the future, will be made of Sontag’s many-sided career. It may be that the fiction will be treated as a secondary matter. “The Volcano Lover” was a high peak of modern psychological realism, but Sontag never matched it in her other novels. If there is one achievement that people should remember her for, it is the critical essays, mostly on writers and filmmakers, that she collected in “Against Interpretation” (1966), the volume that made her famous; “Styles of Radical Will” (1969); and “Under the Sign of Saturn” (1980).”