The modern narrator, in a dream, finds herself in Poland in the 1860s, at one of the last parties given for that country's most celebrated actress. Maryna, her husband Bogdan, her writer-suitor and a clutch of worshippers are planning to leave for America to start a utopian community in California. Maryna, at 35, is bored. She has been ill with typhoid, her country is occupied by the Russians and she is sick of holding high the national banner of noble victim.

IN AMERICA By Susan Sontag Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 387 pages, $41

There is a moment in every novel, when the reader must, if the book is successful, be swept away by the story and characters, believing in them to the point where the novel's world is more alive and sharply etched than the reader's own life. Without that sorcery, the book is a failure.

Just what happens in that transformative moment is by no means reserved to high art. John Grisham and Anita Shreve have the storyteller's gift in spades, whereas many of our more celebrated literary fiction writers strain to achieve it. Susan Sontag, in her first conventional novel (she has written two experimental novels), 1992's The Volcano Lover , managed to charm us with her agile, seductive retelling of the love affair between Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton. In America , her latest attempt at mastering the 19th-century novel form, does not even come close.

It is a great shame, because Sontag's materials are so rich and she is so very smart. One wonders whether she is crippled by the thesis she laid out years ago in her influential essay Against Interpre- tation: that what matters in art is style, not content, the telling of the tale, not the tale itself. In novel-writing, it appears that, more than anything, the subject must be taken absolutely seriously, the writer must be humbled by life, as a friend said recently, not convinced, like a clever 15-year-old, that anything can be finessed.

But even Sontag's style is not particularly interesting. Using journal entries, letters and long, paragraphless monologues, Sontag tells the story of a famous actress and her circle.

In America begins with promise. The modern narrator, in a dream, finds herself in Poland in the 1860s, at one of the last parties given for that country's most celebrated actress. Maryna, her husband Bogdan, her writer-suitor and a clutch of worshippers are planning to leave for America to start a utopian community in California. Maryna, at 35, is bored. She has been ill with typhoid, her country is occupied by the Russians and she is sick of holding high the national banner of noble victim. She yearns for a simpler life, shorn of the need always to perform. At least so she thinks, though the reader suspects she is yearning for a meatier role.

The anonymous narrator watches the characters, puzzles over them, drawing conclusions from the details presented, and arduously assigns each an identity. Thus the beginning of the story is revealed -- masterful meta-fictional technique that shows just how a writer insinuates herself into a story -- and it's all downhill from that moment. Maryna is nothing short of a pain. She is histrionic, self-dramatizing and narcissistic. Because the reader has to take on faith that she is an incandescent actress, with a deep, resonant ability to interpret the human condition, she is therefore violently uninteresting. Her insights are thumping clichés and her dilemmas, all minor because nearly everything is solved by her fame or putative talent, move one to irritation, not wonder or pity.

The esteem she is held in by the other characters mystifies. Everyone adores and worships Maryna. Even the narrator is caught in her thrall. "Your corrections are biting, maternal, just. Your example is luminous. The members of your company repay you with adulation and fear and perfect, anxious devotion. You show off, you amaze them. You are at the zenith. Your powers, so you feel now, are unlimited."

The requisite sea voyage is colourful, though the stinking hell of third class is somehow familiar, as is the steamy drama that was New York City in 1867. The narrator appears disengaged from the difficulties that would constitute pig-farming and crop-growing by Polish intellectuals in the late 19th century. The community drifts apart, after spending their collective savings, but no one appears particularly distressed by the failure. Maryna, needing money to pay for her friends' journeys home, returns to the stage in San Francisco. She learns to speak English, auditions and within a matter of months is an instant success, again the most celebrated actress in the country.

There have been so many truly brilliant novels in the last years that illumine the past by truly engaging with it. It is therefore hard to credit a writer who doesn't have something new to tell us or, more important, hasn't been able to uncover another layer of feeling experienced by our ancestors. In America is always readable, sometimes funny, but always stagy and self-conscious. It lacks conflict and emotion, and even the ideas that Sontag provides to keep us interested are not particularly interesting. She writes about writing, about sacrificing private life for art, about acting, about the Jamesian differences between 19th-century America and Europe. And, with deep regret, we just don't care.

Contributing reviewer Elizabeth Nickson is the author of the novel The Monkey-Puzzle Tree , and a Globe and Mail columnist.