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In America

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Publisher
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Date
Award Winners
Fiction
Historical
Literary
National Book Award Winners
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Poland's greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a “utopian commune.” When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, and—as Marina Zalenska—forges a new, even more triumphant career on the American stage

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What The Reviewers Say
Rave
The New Yorker
Whatever Sontag’s new embrace of reality, the person who wrote the essays is still in attendance, with the result that the realism of In America is overlaid with plenty of formalism. The narrative technique changes from chapter to chapter … In America is endlessly self-aware. It is Sontag speaking, as she spoke to us all those years in the essays. Hence the book’s tone, bright, silvery, bracing—tinkling at times. We do not lose ourselves in Maryna; we hover a little above her … What is wonderful about the book is exactly this counterpoint of novelist and essayist, of innocence and knowingness. From the knowingness comes another excellence of In America, its cat’s cradle of meanings.
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Rave
The Los Angeles Times
In America is a picaresque fable, a historical tragicomedy. The story revolves around a Polish actress, Maryna Zalezowska. More than an actress, she is a national symbol for the triply besieged and conquered Poland, a symbol of patriotism, of seriousness, of achievement on a grand scale in the arts … [Sontag] is giving us, in fiction, the history of the loss that led to irony and fragmentation, the death of so much that could formerly be called culture, and she bravely attempts a journey beyond that loss. Sontag has managed to structure a paradox – call it hopeful inconsolability or optimistic pessimism – a belief that the destruction of our ideals and our long-lost innocence can still be narrated, that there is still a story to be told about us and about how we came to be the way we are or to see.
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Mixed
The New York Times
The novel offers little in the way of conflict. To support her family, Maryna moves to San Francisco and returns to the stage under the easier-to-swallow name Madame Marina Zalenska. At this point in the story, some novelists might choose to focus on her insecurities about reviving her abandoned career. But this heroine is too steely to admit such doubt … Sontag's prose here is lithe, playful: in spite of the listless plot, this book has flow. Indeed, In America reads so smoothly that one could almost accuse Sontag of placing too few demands on her readers. Stimulating ideas, as usual, lurk around every corner. But they tend to arrive pre-interpreted … Sentence by sentence, scene to scene, the writing in In America is utterly nimble. It's the ideas, somehow, that lag behind.
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