Choices

On the back cover of the book, it says the following:
"Once or twice in a generation, an astonishing novel reminds us of the staggering and beautiful experience we can find in the best of fiction."

I think Sophie's Choice could have been written a lot better than it was. I suspect a lot of people consider William Styron's novel to be a classic because it was a book that said something about one of the most profound and horrifying events in history. But that in itself, does not necessarily make it a great book.

What It's All About
Set in the late 1940s, Brooklyn, this is the story of Sophie as told by Stingo, a horny, would-be writer who is forced to move into a cheaper boarding house when he's fired from his editing job.

In his new digs, where he's attempting to write the great American novel, he meets and befriends Sophie and Nathan, a couple so seemingly wrapped up in each other that it'd make any lonely singleton jealous.

Sophie, the object of Stingo's secret affection, is desperately, madly in love with the charming yet completely crazy Nathan, who at turns can be the most beautiful, sweet and thoughtful man and at other times be so full of irrational and unprovoked rage. (And it isn't until you're almost at the end of the novel that you learn why he's so mentally unbalanced.)

Sophie is a Pole who lost her entire family during the second world war and who was a prisoner at Auschwitz. And it's when the narrative is dealing with Sophie's time at Auschwitz that we learn about the devestating choice that Sophie had to made --- something that no parent should ever have to be faced with.

What's Great About This Book
For the most part, this is a fairly readable book, despite the fact that it's really long and has really tiny print.

Nathan is the single most compelling character in the book even though personally, I've never encountered a paranoid schizophrenic quite like Nathan. (And I should know, considering I work at a mental hospital and interact with mostly schizophrenic patients all day.)

And Sophie's story is so poignantly sad and intriguing that you have to give credit to Styron for creating such a thought-provoking life for his heroine.

She's rounded up and put into a concentration camp where she struggles to survive, while at the same time worrying about her children. She attempts to seduce the commandant of the camp and then gets raped...not once, but twice.

But...as compelling as this all sounds, we have to explore...

What's Bad About The Book

First of all, the book is narrated by a guy who doesn't even figure into what makes Sophie's story so interesting. Instead, you've got this horny virgin who breaks into the telling of Sophie's story with snippets from his own uninteresting life. (Usually, it's long descriptions of how horny he is or how his father has this farm in the South that he wants Stingo to run...like I said, boring things that have nothing to do with Sophie's story.)

Secondly, you've got the timeline totally screwed up. Styron would have had a much better story if he'd simply made this book about Sophie's ordeal, starting from the time she was forced into an unhappy marriage and subjected to the shame of having an anti-Semetic, tyrannical father to her time in Auschwitz and then her clandestine romance with Nathan. If it was written like that, it wouldn't have made a bad story. It would have been interesting.

But instead, Styron switches the voices back and forth, weaving in and out of different time periods. I don't know what he was trying to do with that --- it's not like he's Bronte, writing Wuthering Heights. The stream-of-consciousness style in which he writes doesn't even have the poetic quality that works in other books, like "The Power of One."

Plus, Sophie isn't an entirely sympathetic character. In some places, she comes across unsympathetic simply because she lies so much.

When All Is Said and Done
The thing with books like Sophie's Choice is that it has a place on the literary shelf as one of those books that enlightened and sophisticated readers read --- it's got that sort of reputation. But I was kind of disappointed when I read it.

I'm usually a pretty fast reader, but I was bogged down a lot by the length and rambling, endless musings of Stingo, who really shouldn't have been in the story.

I almost get the sense that Styron sat down to write a book with no clear idea of what he was going to write about. He just had in mind this character named Stingo and he wrote from there.