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Title: The author gets in the way
Review: Electing to read IN AMERICA beacuse of its awards I found this bloated novel to be a bit heavy on author intrusiveness. As many have pointed out, the first chapter (actually a 27 page paragraph) makes the author analyze a room of Polish people and, without knowing the language or actually hearing conversations in toto, assign them roles as if casting the play that follows. I think this is why we are left with incompletely fleshed out characters. The premise of the book ( expatriation from European nobility to American homgenation) has been written before and better. There are pages of beautiful descriptive writing to be sure - Sontag is well practiced at her craft - but in the end we are left not really caring about the stolid, laborious venture through which we've waded. Though Sontag is hypnotized by studies of history's influences on the present, I think she writes better when she sticks to her own metier.
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