The Books of Susan Sontag, Ranked

There is no way for this not to be a throwdown. You are going to disagree with what I say about her fiction, especially the early stuff. We are going to clash about which essays are best. From that, we will inevitably diverge on which of her essay collections (to me, her most important work) is most vital. As for the monographs, several of them dazzle, but how to find their proper spots among her works is rough going.

These are all books Sontag released in her lifetime (At the Same Time was already edited but not published when she died in 2004). I’m working off the list of the bibliography on the Susan Sontag Foundation website, sans the anthology and the film scripts (it’s so Sontag to have included the two obscure film scripts she wrote among her oeuvre). I have also not ranked the book Sontag’s latest biographer, Benjamin Moser, among many others, attributed to Sontag: her ex-husband Philip Rieff’s career-making Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. I also have not included the essential and revelatory diaries which were published after her death: Reborn: Journals 1947-1963 and As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, 1964-1980 as they represent a whole new phase of Sontag’s career. With her gift for always being in the zeitgeist, Sontag ensured that she’d be talked about well into her afterlife.

14.
The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967) TIE

Why did Sontag feel she had to write experimental fiction? Was there something in the water in the 1960s that makes books like this so prevalent? This is the worst of Sontag: pretentious, overly serious, and the worst sin of all, boring.

13.
Alice in Bed (1993)

This was a close call: Sontag’s play might be worse. Poor Alice James: a miserable life in the shadow of her famous brothers and then this. At least she has Jean Strouse in her corner.

12.
I, etcetera (1977)

 There’s no need to write about Sontag’s short stories. In summary, they are really not good.

11.
The Way We Live Now (1991)

It’s cheating that this counts as its own entry, when it’s essentially just a short story about AIDS that got a lot of play. If someone brought it to your graduate fiction workshop they would get an earful about whether the narrative holds up (it doesn’t). Thus it’s hanging around here with the other Sontag fiction flotsam.

10.
In America (1999)

The book that got Sontag accused of plagiarism is probably best known as that. As a novel it’s overwritten and overdramatic, but not quite over-the-top enough to be camp, which would have saved the whole debacle. Sontag’s saga—and boy, does it read like a saga—of immigrant actress Maryna Zalewska (real name: Helena Modjeska) and her rise to stardom in the late 19th-century lacks the heft I expect from a Sontag book. It’s intellectually bereft; it never finds the right tone. The book’s reception was not all negative, however: it won the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction.

9.
At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (2007)

At the Same Time collects 16 essays and speeches all written in the last years of Sontag’s life, and they just don’t have the same playfulness or provocations as her earlier political essays do. Important takeaway: the Sontag of the oughts can be kind of a drag. This collection would benefit greatly from one of Sontag’s signature hagiographies, her essays championing semi-obscure European writers. Without her literary hero-worship, it’s a lot of political posturing and one of her favorite subjects: torture, torture, and more torture.

8.
Where the Stress Falls (2001)

Again, the Sontag of the oughts is kind of a drag. What saves this book are the lively pieces about writing. Yes, more on Barthes, please. What a cunning little essay on Borges. You are really the only one who likes Walser that much. The photography and film essays have some highlights as well. But the dreaded Overly Serious Sontag emerges in her essay on staging Beckett in Sarajevo (for a hilarious and indelible image of Overly Serious Sontag at her prime let’s-see-if-existentialism-can-save-the-former-Yugoslavia see Terry Castle’s wonderful essay on Sontag, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” in her collection The Professor). Overall, a mixed bag.

7.
The Volcano Lover (1992)

I don’t love The Volcano Lover so much as I acknowledge Sontag’s need to write it, to be a Real Novelist like her heroes after all of her years in the thrush of the essay and monograph. I also can find things in it to like: I’m a collector, like Sontag and like her hero, the Cavaliere, so I appreciate and understand the impulse. The Volcano Lover is a love story—at its core is the romance between the married Emma Hamiliton and Lord Nelson—but curiously for the hyperliterate Sontag it’s also about the ways people express themselves nonverbally as through collecting, as though our fascinations define us as much as our affairs.

6.
Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

Regarding the Pain of Others is like a glorious peanut butter cup of On Photography and Illness as Metaphor (don’t worry, we are getting to the good stuff). In it Sontag explores fecund territory for her: the intersections of pain and the visual; of empathy and self-esteem; of what both blinds us and fascinates us about scenes of torture and death.

Another place where Sontag is an ideal tour guide is this world historical museum of atrocity. She takes the reader (I quote here from Sontag’s extensive Wikipedia page, someone has really done the heavy lifting on this) “from Goya’s “The Disasters of War” to photographs of the American Civil War, lynchings of blacks in the South, and the Nazi death camps, to contemporary horrific images of Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Israel and Palestine, and New York City on September 11, 2001.” That covers it, no?

5.
Illness as Metaphor (1978) and AIDS and its Metaphors (1988) TIE

Sontag wrote the fierce Illness as Metaphor during her first experience with cancer, which is one of the most Sontag-esque things she could have done. Instead of succumbing to the depression which accompanies illness, Sontag used her diagnosis as kindling for this stunning book. She writes beautifully about cancer but despite it being her ailment (which she never reveals) the star of the book is really tuberculosis—in fact, her descriptions of famous tubercular writers made teenaged me hope a little bit that the four-pronged needle test I got every year would swell. Her dilation of the metaphors around these diseases is breathtaking, borrowing passages from afflicted writers like Keats, Thomas Mann, and DH Lawrence. Given the thoroughness and lucidity of her thinking about illness and her strong ties to the gay community (Sontag was a closeted bisexual), it seems a given that she would pounce on how the AIDS crisis was characterized from its earliest days. The books now seem as though they were meant to be read together, notes of the plagues of different artistic generations.

4.
Styles of Radical Will (1969)

Of the books of early essays Styles of Radical Will seems to me to be the most dated. That’s probably due to the inclusion of Sontag’s reportage on Vietnam, “Trip to Hanoi.” There are some insightful moments in “Trip” but it’s not what Sontag does best: she’s always better at the life of the mind than of lived experience (this is part of her problem with her fiction, it never feels properly lived-in). Notable nevertheless are “The Pornographic Imagination”—another timely topic in the sexual revolutionary days of 1969—and Sontag is cozy in her role as literary tour guide in “Thinking Against Oneself: Reflections on Cioran.”

3.
On Photography (1977)

Sontag reinvented how to write about visual art in this winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Criticism. She said On Photography was “a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs.” What does it mean to be a progress? The book is not chronological but shoves its tentacles in any period where photographs really mattered—the Civil War, Steiglitz, Arbus, as a means of capturing beauty, and in the horrors of contemporary photojournalism (her ideas about war photography sadly got a lot of play, all the way up to the photographs of the torture at Abu Grahib). What’s easier to decipher is Sontag’s sense of photographs having a career, the way they keep working to make their subjects relevant. Photographs of her certainly did, from the brash and beautiful young critic on the cover of Against Interpretation to the louche portraits of her supine by Peter Hujar.

2.
Against Interpretation (1966)

The temptation to put Sontag’s real debut at number one is a strong one, for “Notes on Camp” alone, which, to me, would earn any critic a lifetime membership at the grownup’s table. “Camp” is one of those essays I am astonished by every time: both in the sweep of the argument and how she got the details totally right. It is like spun sugar criticism fueled by pure intellect with a touch of the aesthetic—well, more than a touch, a heaping side. Everyone who knows what camp is feels a frisson of something when reading Sontag’s description, and, by now, in a post Ryan Murphy-world, we all know what camp is. Though there are some clunkers in this collection (the essay on science fiction doesn’t quite work), there is also the shrewd “On Style,” and the powerhouse “Against Interpretation” to solidify its place.

1.
Under the Sign of Saturn (1980)

Is this such an oddball choice for number one? To me it is simply peak Sontag: after the successive intellectual explosions of Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, On Photography, and Illness as Metaphor we get Sontag in some of her most brilliant personas: as literary tour guide to Elias Canetti; writing incisively on the paradoxical pleasures of the films of Leni Riefenstahl; as a sympathetic and appropriately melancholy reader of Walter Benjamin (the title refers to Benjamin, and to Sontag: both Capricorns, or Saturnine, as am I). Her eulogies for Paul Goodman and Roland Barthes are like literary petits fours, small and rich and altogether divine.