Carlin Romano is apalled by many of the things written about Susan Sontag after her death. Why all the false cliches? “If Sontag had lived for another decade, the esteem in which many international critics held her might have won her the Nobel Prize for literature. Why, then, should the cliché persist that she remained primarily a critic? Might it be that “appreciation writers” — praising her for always thinking for herself — couldn’t do so themselves? That “appreciators” who celebrated her indefatigable reading couldn’t be troubled to read her fiction and enter a judgment of their own? That American media, only attentive to intellectuals when they bark out something outré, insisted on reducing her to a highbrow sound-bite babe?”