SUSAN SONTAG: Stand Aside, Sisyphus

The strangest pitch that anyone threw this summer in Bull Durham was a curve ball that Kevin Costner delivered to Susan Sarandon. In the midst of a romantic face-off, he announced that "the novels of Susan Sontag are self- indulgent, overrated crap." Sarandon was so surprised -- Who was talking literature? -- that it took a few scenes before she hit the pitch back: "I think Susan Sontag is brilliant!" So there. Alerted by friends to this great debate, the flesh-and-blood Sontag left Bull Durham off her must-see list. She well remembered watching a French-Canadian film, The Decline of the American Empire, a few years ago. In that one, a plump Casanova confides that the woman he most wants to sleep with is . . . Susan Sontag. Out in the audience, the startled woman of his dreams grimaced. "It was like somebody threw a spitball at me in the theater."

If Sontag's name finds its way into some unlikely exchanges, it may be a sign that intellect is not just a target but a magnet, a fascination even in a culture more preoccupied with stadium bruisers and nymphets. At 55, she has been one of the most visible intellectual figures in American life for more than two decades. In two novels, a collection of short stories and five volumes of essays, Sontag has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience. In private, she can be funny and informal, tilting her head sideways when she laughs, so that the band of gray in her hair fans out like a comet's tail. But on the page, she emanates an implacable gravity, a command of literature and philosophy that leaves one riveted, if also a bit self-reproachful. While you were flipping channels, it seems, she was laboring under the burden of consciousness. While you were rooting for the Dodgers, she was sifting through Artaud. "Reading is my television," she once said. For most people, it's the other way around.

Sontag doesn't own a TV, though she did rent one last month to please a houseguest. (Regarding it with the look of a bird that has found a meteor plunked in her nest, she shrugs, "I haven't turned it on yet.") She also has no phone-answering machine, no word processor and, in most of her two-bedroom New York City duplex, no air conditioning. The coolest spot in the place is likely to be the sun-room that opens onto a small terrace. That was where she spent much of the past summer, with its Egyptian heat and rain-forest humidity, penning in revisions on the typed manuscript of her first entirely new book in a decade.

AIDS and Its Metaphors, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish in January, examines the way the epidemic is thought about and discussed. She conceived it as a sequel to Illness As Metaphor, the 1978 work that emerged from her experience with breast cancer, a mastectomy and years of chemotherapy. The earlier book, by tracing myths that had attached themselves to tuberculosis and cancer, brilliantly discredited notions -- like that of the pent-up, "cancer-prone" personality -- that add senseless guilt and shame to the burdens patients already carry. "But it's much more common now for people to be candid about cancer," she says "because there's a new disease to hang all your fantasies and phobias on -- AIDS."