Lava Soap

TITLE: THE VOLCANO LOVER

AUTHOR: SUSAN SONTAG

PUBLISHER: FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX; 415 PAGES; $22

THE BOTTOM LINE: A postmodern pot unexpectedly boils over.

Long before the U.S. lost its trade balance, it was lopsided with intellectual goods from Europe. Marx, Freud, Sartre and Levi-Strauss were required cribbing. Books translated from the French and German were best sellers and their authors culture heroes. So were their interpreters. As a critic and novelist, Susan Sontag handled European ideas and forms with brilliance and style. The camera loved her dark good looks, and she became an American knockoff of the Continental intellectual as gravely seductive celebrity. The brain, she said on at least one occasion, is an erogenous zone.

The Volcano Lover, her fifth work of fiction, is a mild cerebral aphrodisiac. It is the sort of book that Sontag would probably call determinedly middlebrow. Her publisher, eager to start a buzz, compares it to “the postmodern potboilers of Umberto Eco and A.S. Byatt.”

The subject is the scandalous romance of the late 18th century’s hottest couple: Lord Nelson, Britain’s greatest naval hero, and Lady Emma Hamilton, the empire’s most luscious pinup — and wife of diplomat Sir William Hamilton. The story has usually been told from the straightforward missionary — not to say colonial — position. The Alexander Korda version, That Hamilton Woman, starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, was Winston Churchill’s favorite movie.

Sontag creamily shifts perspective. The hero and his mistress are egoists gone on fame and oblivious to the welfare of the masses. Off the poop deck, Nelson is an unimposing shrimp. Without her billowing satins, Emma the society swan is grossly overstuffed. Most of the action takes place in Naples, where nearby Mount Vesuvius huffs and puffs. It is a natural wonder, but also an unavoidable symbol of molten passion and the republican revolution that erupts in France and spreads south.

Royalty and privilege are threatened. So too is a genteel culture represented by Sir William, British envoy to the decadent Neapolitan court. A collector of antiquities and an amateur scientist, he occasions Sontag’s heavier musings. Unfortunately, he is too underpowered to be the principal vehicle in a historical tour de force. Making a cameo appearance, Goethe dismisses him as “a simple-minded epicurean.”

Eventually Sontag also sours on Sir William’s detachment and bloodless pleasures. In fact, all three members of this famous love triangle are abruptly damned in an operatic epilogue about male-dominated class structures and the challenges of feminism. The message is unexceptionable but jarring. Perhaps Sontag, like Vesuvius, simply blew her top. More likely, the outburst was calculated to amplify an otherwise low-key narrative and convince readers that the author is not only postmodern but also politically correct.