SOPHIE, NOT MY CHOICE

Sophies Choice is a novel told through the eyes of a young southerner, Stingo, who moves to Brooklyn in 1947. There he meets his neighbors, Sophie and Nathan. The story revolves around Stingo trying to write a book and his friendship with Sophie and Nathan.
Sophie is a victim of the Holocaust and Nathan suffers from mental illness. Interlaced within the plot are pictures of Sophies guilt, Stingos crush on Sophie, Nathans hot and cold relationship with Sophie and Stingo and Sophies past coming back to shape her future.

This book has risen to classic status and the story is indeed good. The problem is that the novel literally drowns in an ocean of needless verbosity. One gets the feeling, while reading this that Styron gorged himself with a Thesaurus prior to each time he worked on the book and spewed it page after page. The result is that the plot, while thick, is hindered from moving forward by a needless heavy coating of vocabulary and details which, while sounding poetic and pleasing, must be stepped around in order to get to the final page. These details, replete with words seldom seen outside of higher academia, provide a tolerable form of entertainment at first, but soon grow very tiresome and lead one to be tempted to an Evelyn Wood speed reading course in order to maintain some sense of what is happening.

In other words, this book literally screams to be abridged. This is something that is abhorrent to my nature as a reader of fiction, but exceptions are a fact of life and this is a case in point. A more judicious editor, willing to put a harness on Styrons runaway symphony of Thesaurus and detail, could have left a lot of trees still standing and helped more readers get through a good story with a lot less frustration.