"That's right," she says. "But something in me changed or evolved very dramatically with The Volcano Lover. I felt as if I'd always been in the grip of, well, not the anxiety of influence, but just plain old anxiety."

"Which is something."

"Yeah," she says. "Which is big, which is major. I felt that I had never really gone into fourth gear, never really pulled out the throttle, or whatever the right boring image is. I'd never really let go, in any case, because I was scared, because I was sure I couldn't. I don't know why. I do know that I suddenly found much more freedom as a writer when I conceived of The Volcano Lover and started to write it. And when I finished it--well, instead of wanting to put it behind me and go on to something else, I almost felt as if I should now cash in my chips and, you know, join the Peace Corps."

So how, I ask, did she get started with In America?

Sontag, who has made many of her points staring determinedly at a spot between her scuffed white sneakers, looks up and across the room, where busts of Schiller and Pushkin look back at her. "It was really hard to start another book," she confesses. "It felt like being at the foot of Mount Everest all over again. But I finally got an idea--this would be in 1993--that was such a good idea, if I may sound immodest, that it nearly sank the novel."

She's referring to the so-called Zero Chapter of the novel, in which a contemporary American woman not unlike the author is parachuted into the past--more specifically, into a party in rural Lithuania, circa 1876, where she must slowly and invisibly find her bearings. Some novelists might have used this as a warm-up exercise, and discarded it once their narrative muscles became sufficiently pliable. For Sontag, it's an essential curtain-raiser: a story about storytelling, which introduces a novel about the personal and national arts of self-fabrication.

"I had that idea like in an hour!" Sontag tells me. "Then it took a year to write it and rewrite it and rewrite it. And when it was finished, I thought: My God, how do I actually now tell it? I felt almost as if I had produced the ultimate modernist short story--you know, where you don't actually tell the story, you only talk about it. But that's not what I wanted to write. I wanted to write a historical epic, with all the real concrete materiality of the world the characters lived in."

That she did. In America is a meticulous chronicle of life in both worlds, Old and New, just as the United States was beginning its modern-day ascendancy. Sontag has done her spadework, reproducing her Polish diva's dressing room or the mirrored elevators in San Francisco's Palace Hotel down to the finest detail. In fact there's a kind of sensual richness, an attention to the pathos or poignancy or power of things, that suggests an oddball convergence of Robbe-Grillet and Balzac (which, come to think of it, neatly sums up the trajectory of Sontag's fiction-writing career). This, according to the author, is no accident. She argues that her senses themselves seem to have become more acute.

"I've had a rush of sensory material that I'm very aware of," reports Sontag. "Particularly in the way I see things: when I wander around the world and look at objects and places and people, I'm constantly registering things in a very visual way. You know, I see the little silver spots on your right shoe and I wonder whether it's snow. In passing I even note that it's an interesting pattern."

I glance at my shoe for an instant, flattered that it had managed to make its way into Susan Sontag's sensory universe. The phone rings for the 10th time, my host declines to answer it, and, registering the visual absence of coffee in her mug, she leads me down the hall to the kitchen. Like most of her apartment, the narrow corridor is crammed with books and art objects, including several Piranesi engravings, a Brice Marden, and a framed sequence by stop-motion godfather Eadweard Muybridge. While Sontag refills her mug in the kitchen, I study the shelves in there, too, which contain books, magazines, and great sheaves of yellowing newspaper clippings that she drew on for In America. Never before have I seen a household with not one but several volumes on Henryk Sienkiewicz--Nobel Prize winner, author of Quo Vadis, the model for In America’s Ryszard and, Sontag assures me, "the worst writer in the history of the world."

Clearly the author has leaned on these archival materials for much of her novel. But given the fact that she spent part of her childhood in the arid country around Tucson, Arizona, I was curious about the imaginative provenance of In America's desert scenes. Maryna Zalewska and her companions try (and fail) to establish a utopian farming community in Southern California, which is a desert of a different kind. Still, Sontag's descriptions of the terrain, with its "seductive nihilism," have a hypnotic and distinctly first-hand intensity.

GO TO PAGE 3 OF "DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN"