Reading this book I became aware that the unauthorized celebrity bio is indeed a genre and this one, I think, must be a good example of the form. The tone is professionally cool, the writing dominated by the canned sound of "intelligent summary" that emanates from the industry of untalented researchers. Sontag's biographers are not engaged by her ideas, but they catalog them assiduously; they are not unskeptical of how she got where she is, but they admire the success; they insinuate whenever they can, yet they do not sit in judgment. The book neither sympathizes with its subject nor trashes her. A kind of semiruthless, semi-good-natured impersonality prevails throughout. In short, she is simply a timely subject for a pair of pros -- one of them has already done Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer -- for whom pedestrian evenhandedness is a signature trait.

Sontag herself is a problematic subject for any biographer (much less one to whom she would not speak). Living as she does in a fishbowl, she long ago put in place a way of being in the world -- cold, arrogant, dramatic-looking -- that evolved, ultimately, into an impenetrable disguise, one that remains, finally, unrevealing. As for her writing, although she became famous as a young woman for her bold '60s essays -- the ones announcing a sea change in the culture -- hers was always the voice of an educated urban intellectual, free of inflection or nuance, in rigorous possession of a traditional intelligence that could research an insight and organize the material prodigiously. But she was from the beginning, and has remained to this day, a formal -- not a personal -- essayist. Even when the impetus for the work is openly derived from her own experience (as in "Illness as Metaphor"), she herself is not there on the page.

This book never penetrates the glazed surface of Sontag's appearance or the formal character of her work. It simply recapitulates the career, paying heavy attention to the time and effort both she and her publisher, Roger Straus, have put into the management of her public persona. As if this is big news, it announces her lesbianism, with no insight into what it has meant to her to love women instead of men; and it gossips about her unconventional relation to her son -- an Israeli writer said, watching them together, "She's not a mother and he's not a son." But however many interviews were conducted with friends and enemies alike, the reader is left knowing that a wall still stands behind which Susan Sontag lurks, undetected and unknown.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"