Form as Hero

...But, as with the picaresque vagabonds of Smollet or Fielding, Hippolyte is repeatedly pricked and distracted by the real world...

...Reviewed by DONALD PHELPS For me Susan Sontag's first novel, like her critical essays, beguilingly evokes an image of Lillian Gish playing Chopin on a piano to the Comanches in the shadows of her vast desert ranch in The Unfor given...

...but its only effect here, where it passes for denouement, is to make the remainder of the novel seem more flat and disengaged than it deserves to be...

...Like the revolving spiral used by hypnotists in movies, The Benefactor seems constantly to disappear into its own center: the enterprising imagination of Hippolyte...

...Having said that, one must go on to state unequivocally that The Benefactor is very much worth reading...

...In fact, any image suggesting a shrewd, serene, housewifely confidence in form which sustains and insulates, which reflects a sharp-edged and patient intelligence, would be applicable to Miss Sontag...

...but, regrettably, she seldom gives the impression of having even obliquely contended with the world she writes about...

...Indeed, Hippolyte's vivacity demonstrates the essential charm of the novel: a comic brio which consists neither of imaginative ebullience, nor of surrealism—for the principal character is too clearly defined for that—but of a dry, darting nonchalance of tone...

...In The Benefactor, Miss Sontag dress up as a boy, so to speak, and ventures far from the gardens and parlors of Miss Austen...

...It is the real world in which he seduces and later sells into slavery his patroness, Frau Anders...

...An alternate image might be Edna Best tending the stove on her family island in Swiss Family Robinson...

...Jean-Jacques twits Hippolyte for husbanding his theories of identity, rather than building up his own identity step by step...

...His dreams, he finds, are the only absolute and irremediable form of action which he can imagine, apart from crime (in contrast to his dream studies, his attempts at crime seem unreal...

...It is a world of metaphysical conceits and dreams: the substance of identity...

...The kind of smallness on which Miss Sontag has chosen to concentrate her talents, frequently successfully, is a fine quality...

...As for the Hippolytus myth, it blends too neatly into the story to disturb or complicate it in any serious way, and works rather like one of those puzzle-pictures in which a face turned upside down becomes another, yet similar, face...

...in which he attempts to murder her and then, upon her inexplicable reappearance, provides a sanctuary for her in an old mansion...

...This has been done successfully through tone and narrative rhythm by earlier novelists...

...Throughout his adventures, Hippolyte is counter-poised against Jean-Jacques: a rogue-poet, homosexual and thief who enacts the absoluteness of crime as Hippolyte fondles the absoluteness of dream...

...Although Hippolyte, a scholar and dilettante who runs through a great many adventures, fills pages with his personal speculations, these are nipped off by the precise, faintly inflected prose, like so many cubes snapped out of an ice tray...

...nor, I am afraid, is she always careful to distinguish between equanimity and gliding blandness...

...Perhaps the greatest annoyance in this otherwise largely likable book is its conclusion, which formally attempts to confuse dream and reality...

...and in which, finally, seeing his dream life more and more absorbed by an increasingly illusory reality, he withdraws to the comfortable front porch of old age and quiet benevolence...

...Unlike most American female writers of recent years—unlike, say, Katherine Anne Porter, or Mary McCarthy, or Eudora Welty—Miss Sontag attends to a world that is not primarily realistic...

...Ultimately, I suppose my dissatisfactions with this novel rest not so much with its limitations as with its failure to press those limitations as energetically as it might...

...And one of Miss Sontag's pleasanter ironies has been to portray Jean-Jacques —the untethered rover—as a rather squalid beetle, while Hippolyte, the contemplator, is a dancing waterfly...

...Even the intellectual play, the foam of epigrams and elaborate conceits, serves to further define the quality of Hippolyte's intelligence...

...The effect of this tone on Hippolyte's melodramatic adventures (the white slavery and the attempted murder) is to produce a wry distortion which is quite piquant...

...Yet Jane Austen, choosing a similarly constricted field, made her tiny gardens bristle with stress and fine-lined complexities...

...In the Benefactor, a small, comic and charming work, she has given us a book whose protagonist, Hippolyte, tries to encompass life with just such a Sontaguesque sense of form, and whose hero is that sense of form...

...Yet the prevailing atmosphere of the book, at once its chief quality and its principal limitation, is one of hard-lighted wakefulness...

...Obsessed with the notion of identity as form, he becomes an aficionado of his own dreams...

...By the same token, the eclecticisms which embellish the story—tidbits from, among others, Gide, Rousseau, Voltaire—do not sour or oppress us nearly as much as they might: The birdlike purposefulness and persistent energy of Miss Sontag's writing infect us with her own bustling sobriety and cunning, and thus spare us the giddy sense of wayward burrowing...