Word: writer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...culture more preoccupied with stadium bruisers and nymphets. At 55, she has been one of the most visible intellectual figures in American life for more than two decades. In two novels, a collection of short stories and five volumes of essays, Sontag has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience. In private, she can be funny and informal, tilting her head sideways when she laughs, so that the band of gray in her hair fans out like a comet's tail. But on the page...
...typical of Sontag that she would turn a personal preoccupation into an occasion for larger reflections. Her collected work is a map of her consuming passions: the French writer Roland Barthes, the German critic Walter Benjamin, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. (In her spare time, she has directed four films abroad.) All her work aims at defining a vaporous but crucial notion, the modern sensibility. She combines a metropolitan taste, omnivorous and hard to satisfy, with a transatlantic mind, drawn to European writers and filmmakers. Often she discusses them in the European form of fragments and epigrams. "I get impatient...
...later do graduate work at Harvard and Oxford.) At 17 she married sociologist Philip Rieff, then a 28-year-old instructor, just ten days after she met him. The marriage, which lasted seven years, was her first and last. It produced a son, David, now 36, an editor and writer in Manhattan and another of his mother's consuming passions...
...that I'm trying to kick. My last essay is like my last cigarette." She quit smoking two years ago, but there's still one more essay she plans to turn out, this one about intellectuals and Communism, taking as its point of departure the disillusioning trip that the writer Andre Gide made to the Soviet Union in 1936. And then there's a short book on Japan. And then . . . Well, at least the tube won't be distracting her. The houseguest has departed, and the men have come to retrieve the rented TV. "I did watch...
Last Notes from Home adds flesh to the fictive narrator of the two earlier books. Literally. "The dude I call Exley," as the writer refers to his hero, stands 5 ft. 10 in. and occasionally balloons up to 180 lbs., thanks to the metabolism of aging, innumerable beers and a quart or so of liquor a day. He still lives in his native upstate New York, where he keeps his mother company in her house. When he learns that his older brother William, a retired colonel in the U.S. Army, is dying of cancer in Hawaii, Exley hops a plane...