Has fiction ruined Susan Sontag?

The answer is yes. Not, of course, for the legion of readers who devoured her 1993 novel The Volcano Lover, nor for those who have waited nearly eight years for her latest production, In America. But the addictive pleasure of creating plots and characters does seem to have rendered this supremely cerebral author unfit for her original vocation: writing essays. At least that's what Sontag says, as we sit talking in her living room on an extraordinarily frigid January morning in 2000.

"I agreed to do this piece on W.G. Sebald," she tells me, "and I'm agonizing over it like a beginner." Sontag leans back in an enormous upholstered chair. She's wearing a reddish flannel shirt over a charcoal sweater and dark leggings, and this workaday ensemble makes her resemble a mere intellectual mortal, which she isn't. "I don't have any facility any more. I don't know how to sit down and think of that smart first sentence and begin, you know, rolling along."

In the prologue to In America, in fact, Sontag observes that writing feels like "following and leading, both, and at the same time." Does she now find the essay too labor-intensive, too much a matter of leading without ever being led?

"Yes," she says. "That's one way of putting it. When I used to write essays, my final drafts would often bear very little relation to my first draft. I would change my mind. My view of whatever I was writing about would keep shifting. And I was a compulsive, or let's say fanatical, reviser. It never occurred to me that I could get it right the first time around."

"But that's the whole point of those essays," I suggest. "The reader gets to watch you thinking through the ideas, rather than simply delivering them in prefabricated form."

"They're certainly idea-driven," she agrees, "in the sense that the subject is always a pretext. If I wrote about something, it was really to enable me to write about something else. Take this piece I'm doing on Sebald. My problem with his new book is that I just love it--I don't have any ideas about it. I'll find some ideas about it if it kills me." She breaks into laughter and fiddles briefly with her black frame glasses. "But my enthusiasm for his work doesn't really have a discursive quality. So that's rather alien to me, writing about something without having some idea that I can actually fold the work back into."

Sontag's novels, needless to say, are hardly starved for ideas. Indeed, they're more fortified with abstract thought than many a work of nonfiction, and The Volcano Lover included long passages in which the essayist had clearly nudged the novelist out of the driver's seat. Still, Sontag does approach fiction in a fundamentally different manner, which seems to verge on a form of literary channeling.

"Of course I rewrite the fiction, too," she says, "but it's about 80 percent there the first time through. And even while I'm revising, it does feel like I'm taking something down. The story has the quality of a real history to which I need to be true, and which I can change only with a great deal of trepidation. I know it sounds totally wacky, but writing fiction does strike me as a kind of performance, or transcription, of some preexisting reality."

Whether Sontag is merely (as Stravinsky once described his relationship to The Rite of Spring) a conduit is a question we're not likely to answer this afternoon. But her fiction of the last decade has transformed not only her working methods but her feelings about her own creations.

"You know, The Volcano Lover is the first book I ever wrote that I loved, as opposed to liked, " she says. "Before that, I used to do the best I could, whatever that means, and then forget about it. Well, it's not that I forgot about the essays, I just didn't want to become attached to them. I'm in thrall to the great American fantasy, which is one of constant reinvention."

Her career, I suggest, has featured a great many such reinventions. The fearless explicator of camp begat the chilly nouveau roman specialist , who begat the intermittent filmmaker and photography critic, who begat the reconstructed anticommunist of the 1980s, and so on and so forth.

GO TO PAGE 2 OF "DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN"