It’s interesting to compare Janet Malcolm’s “The Unholy Practice,” in this week’s issue, with Melissa Anderson’s “For Interpretation,” in the current Bookforum. Both are reviews of Benjamin Moser’s recently published Sontag: Her Life and Work. Malcolm says Moser’s feelings for Sontag are mixed – “he always seems a little awed as well as irked by her.” She writes,
Midway through the biography, he drops the mask of neutral observer and reveals himself to be—you could almost say comes out as—an intellectual adversary of his subject.
Compare this with Anderson’s view:
With Sontag, Moser intelligently brings together both public and private, onstage and off-. His scrutiny of her essays, fiction, films, and political activism is clear-eyed, his analysis of her tumultuous affective life sympathetic (if at times slightly less astute).
Which is it – sympathetic or adversarial? I guess I’ll have to read Moser’s book to find out.
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