The Benefactor : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Much brain, little heart
Review: Susan Sontag's first novel (published in 1963) is a fairly turgid, over-intellectualized tale, mostly notable for a stiff prose style that suggests the author had never read a book written after 1900. Sontag is, of course, primarily an essayist, and the book is at its best whenever she's just musing on various subjects. "If war did not satisfy an elementary desire--not the desire to destroy, which is superficial, but the desire to be in a state of strain, to feel more intensely--the practice of war would have been tried once and abandoned." But this is "thought provoking" in the worst sense--more of a lecture than a fully realized novel. The book is full of aphorisms, but the characters and events tend to be unconvincing (such as the narrator's unlikely detour into movie acting). It is finally undramatic and lifeless; monotony sets in well before the end. It comes off like a second-rate version of Andre Gide's "The Immoralist."