The Benefactor is a novel by Susan Sontag published in 1963 by Farrar, Straus & Company.
Sontag's first novel, it was inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Hippolytus of Athens and his step-mother Phaedra
Contents
Reception
In an interview with critic John J. Enck, metafiction writer John Barth dismissed both the novel and its author:
I didn't especially care for The Benefactor. Sontag writes like a middle-aged French roue. She writes like Carl Jung dreaming he is Candide (1759). That makes it sound exciting, doesn't it? There's a picture of a good-looking chick on the back of the jacket, and a note that she teaches philosophy and theology at Columbia. Don't believe it. Susan Sontag does not exist.
New York Times reviewer Daniel Stern characterizes The Benefactor as a “picaresque anti-novel” and faults Sontag for failing to develop her protagonist, the aging Hippolyte, who existence as a literary figure emerges as little more than an “ambiguous dream.”
Reviewer Robert W. Flint at Commentary offers high praise for the novel: “Susan Sontag…has written a Marius the Epicurean for the 1960’s [and] it must be said that she has done so with a rapt and thorough awareness of what she was about.”
Retrospective appraisal
New York Times literary critic Cynthia Ozick honors The Benefactor less for its “sly audacity” and more for its author's aesthetic legacy.
The Benefactor has no beneficiaries, no literary heirs, either in Sontag's own work or in that of her admirers. But society at large is heir to the cultural rupture, the linked discordances, that she championed.”