Novel: In America

Overview
Susan Sontag’s In America reimagines the career of a famed nineteenth‑century Polish actress who emigrates to the United States and undertakes the risky, theatrical project of reinventing herself. Loosely inspired by Helena Modjeska, the novel turns its heroine, Maryna, into a prism for examining ambition, exile, art, language, and the alluring, disruptive ideal of America. Sontag threads together voices, diary pages, and omniscient storytelling to show how a life becomes a narrative and how performance can both reveal and obscure the self.

Setting and Premise
The story begins in partitioned Poland, where Maryna is celebrated as the greatest stage actress of her generation. She is married to Bogdan, a cultivated aristocrat and political man, and bound, with undeniable romantic and intellectual force, to Ryszard, a young writer whose hunger for experience matches her own. Growing restless with the constraints of Polish society and inspired by a vogue for utopian experiments, the trio gathers friends and followers to embark on a transatlantic venture: they will found a model community in the New World. America is imagined as a blank page, a moral and artistic fresh start, a stage larger than any stage.

From Utopia to the Stage
California tests them. The colony they establish in the hills of the Southland is battered by logistics, drought, finances, and the half‑hidden hierarchies the group thought it had left behind. Farmwork grinds down idealism; intimacy frays under the pressure of scarcity and jealousy. Maryna discovers that the dream of purification through labor is no match for the vocation that made her famous. Her gift demands an audience. She leaves the commune to try something bolder: remaking herself as an American actress in a language she does not yet command.

Encounters and Reinvention
Maryna’s passage from immigrant to star is grueling and thrilling. She drills English, sculpts her accent, trims and expands her repertory, and submits to the harsh itineraries of American touring theater. The stages of inland towns and burgeoning cities become laboratories for calibrating taste and feeling across cultures. She brushes against the era’s intellectual celebrities, takes the measure of American manners, and studies a public that wants both sincerity and spectacle. Success arrives, but never simply. Bogdan and Ryszard orbit her, partner, impresario, rival, lover, each complicating the self she is trying to author. Their circle disperses, regathers, and disperses again, as the colony’s failure shadows their new lives with a persistent question: what does it mean to belong?

Style and Concerns
Sontag layers narrative modes to mirror the book’s central tension between lived life and staged life. Letters and notebooks expose Maryna’s self‑scrutiny; a cool, essayistic narrator frames episodes with reflections on fame, immigration, and the contagious myth of America. The novel dwells on the elasticity of identity: how crossing borders changes one’s voice, how art translates feeling, how desire turns experience into story. America appears as both destination and device, a machine for producing novelty, a geography of second chances that exacts payment in dislocation. The theater, too, is a machine: it grants a person a second, perfected self, while reminding her that every role ends when the curtain falls.

Aftermath
By the end, the utopian dream is a memory and a measure. Maryna has claimed a new public and confirmed her mastery, yet the costs are plain, estrangements, the ache of language learned late, the knowledge that celebrity can be a more gilded kind of exile. The novel closes not with resolution but with poise: a woman at once fulfilled and unsettled, moving forward inside the paradox she chose, performing herself in a country dedicated to the art of becoming someone new.