Cotkin explores what Susan Sontag and Tom Wolfe, among others, dubbed 'the New Sensibility,' a term he admits contains so many possible definitions that 'trying to reach one is a game that has its delights but never ends with victory.' He’s right about its delights — the book fascinates on every page — and also about the inevitable failure of assigning any single meaning to the label. It doesn't matter.
[I]n essence, Cotkin’s presentation of the New Sensibility is a reductionist version of Sontag’s explorations. And whether he is writing about a minimalist score by John Cage, or Pynchon’s literary behemoth Gravity’s Rainbow, he hammers his theme home.
Much of Mr. Cotkin’s book is a re-narration of the more dramatic—the more excessive—events in the lives and works of these figures...It is not clear, though, whether Mr. Cotkin has managed to come up with a significantly new interpretation of what he calls, following Susan Sontag, 'the New Sensibility.'
...[Cotkin] does justice to the radical vision of the New Sensibility by presenting it with considerable craft. Instead of broad, brash strokes of cultural criticism, Cotkin creates 'vignettes,' each chapter dealing with a single year in which he focuses on a representative artist, profiling 'cultural creators' ranging from Marlon Brando to Amiri Baraka, Robert Rauschenberg to Erica Jong.
