Celebrated American author Susan Sontag died on Tuesday, leading me to consider my response to various work of hers I read while in college in the late eighties. Sontag is best known for her essays, and I remember reading two of her most famous; Notes on Camp and Illness as Metaphor. Given her reputation as an influential intellectual, I was anticipating significant ideas, or — at the very least — a degree of passion and wit that would evoke some sense of pleasure. Instead I found them insipid and self-important; the work of a thoughtful, unsophisticated person who was a less than accomplished writer.

This disappointment would not prepare me, however, for the acute awfulness of her fiction. To this day, I cannot imagine how I slogged through the entirety of The Benefactor — a novel written in the most uniformly flaccid prose I have ever had the opportunity to read.

While I did not find the content of the landmark Notes particularly insightful or original, it occurred to me that her argument might have seemed provocative in the States back in 1964. Casting herself in the role of aesthete, she attempts to defy conventional notions of taste without any of the charm or wit of, say, Wilde. Her central premise, that 'bad' art can be good, struck me as being at once too easy, self-evident, and half-baked to qualify as an epiphany or paradigm shift. Worse, its tone reminded me of the classroom papers being composed by some of my more insufferable fellow students. In Notes I found myself face-to-face with the sophomore-style of writing — alternately earnest and glib — that my classmates and I had once embraced but were now hoping to leave behind as we evolved into masters of our respective disciplines.

Illness I remember as less coherent and more naïve, lacking the formal integrity and general pep of Notes. Are we supposed to be surprised to discover that subjects such as illness are frequently romanticized or demonized in art?

In spite of their obvious shortcomings, I do think that Notes and Illness are both significant works, however. With them, Sontag introduced a new form of essay to American letters, one that has more in common with Roland Barthes than Lionel Trilling. Because of her, the medium now allows the intellectual a more dramatic, charismatic role within his or her own work — a role the writer can also play within the larger context of American life.

Although Sontag had a public profile extraordinary for an American essayist in her times, as a writer she never seemed quite up to the task. And as far as her fiction is concerned, the less said the better.