In America

Sontag builds the novel around Maryna Zalezowska, a celebrated actress modeled closely on the real nineteenth-century Polish star Helena Modjeska, who abandons a successful career in Warsaw's theater in 1876 to lead a small circle of friends and family, including her husband Bogdan and the young writer Ryszard, a lightly fictionalized Henryk Sienkiewicz, later Poland's Nobel laureate, to found a Fourierist-influenced commune in Anaheim, California, convinced that farming and communal simplicity offer a truer life than the stage ever could. The commune collapses within a year, undone by naive planning and a climate none of them understand, and Sontag treats that failure not as tragedy but as the hinge the whole novel turns on: Maryna's reinvention only really begins once her first, purer American fantasy has already been discarded.

Freed from the commune and from her old Polish stage name, Maryna teaches herself English and rebuilds an acting career from nothing across small American theaters, and Sontag uses that climb, ruthless self-invention through Shakespeare, through relentless touring, through a new stage name built for American audiences, to argue that America's real national religion isn't liberty so much as the sanctioned right to discard an old self entirely and author a new one, a subject close to Sontag's own lifelong interest in celebrity, performance, and self-fashioning as forms of art in their own right.

Sontag begins the book with an unnamed contemporary narrator, unmistakably Sontag herself, eavesdropping on a nineteenth-century dinner party she has no business attending, and returns periodically throughout to break the historical illusion with first-person commentary on why she's telling this particular story this particular way. The device keeps the novel from settling into straightforward historical fiction, insisting instead that Maryna's story is being actively constructed, chosen, and interpreted by a writer working more than a century later, which mirrors exactly what the novel argues Maryna herself is doing to her own biography.

One full chapter hands the narration entirely to Edwin Booth, the real, celebrated American Shakespearean actor and brother of Lincoln's assassin, delivered as a single unbroken monologue reflecting on Maryna, on acting, and on his own family's unshakeable, inherited notoriety. Sontag uses Booth's chapter to widen the novel's argument about performed identity past Maryna alone, into an entire American theatrical culture built, top to bottom, on people convincing audiences and themselves that a chosen self can outweigh an inherited one.