This was the first step, along with my reread of Kavalier & Clay, to read through the National Book Award and Pulitzer winners of the 21st Century, and I have some questions about what the NBA panel was thinking.

My full apologies to the venerable Ms. Sontag, but I have to start with the fact that books about jobs are boring, books about the arts are often worse, and books about performance (especially if you cannot go watch a clip) are the worst yet. Sontag sets herself up with the impossible task of getting across the greatness of this real life star of the Polish and American stage, so you are not surprised when she does not succeed. But one has to wonder why she even tried.

Matters are not helped by the fact that Chapter 0 starts the book with an energetic momentum that the rest of the book does nothing to fulfill to the point where you have to wonder if it's numbered 0 because it does not belong in this book. We start with an interesting second person narration from a unnamed, but presumably Sontag-shaped, time traveller who allows themself to spectate the preparations of a party preparing to depart their native Poland for America.

From there, it takes three more chapters for us to actually be In America, yet when we end up finally in New York, even this minor plot success is undercut because "everyone insists to us is [New York] now so overrun by immigrants as to be but an extension of Europe—not America at all!" Many people, but rarely the strong female lead who drags her coterie to and through America for the rest of the book, then tell us the attempts to launch a Californian commune that lead to the ultimate return of our star to the stage where she is inexplicably loved and lauded and spends four more years, which the plot churns through in the last four, yet increasingly lengthy, chapters until we end, yet again, not on the voice of this woman who has wowed America but yet another man who gets to speak at (and for) her.

Here's hoping that the NBA boards get better with time!