Her thought processes dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. “I can't choose! I can't choose!” She began to scream. Oh, how she recalled her own screams! Tormented angels never screeched so loudly above hell's pandemonium. “Ich kann nicht wählen!” she screamed.Sophie's Choice was on my radar to read for two reasons: it's on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list (which I'm pecking away at slowly); and there's a scene in The Year of Magical Thinking, repeated more than once, in which Joan Didion recalls her husband – the author Gregory Donne – standing in their California swimming pool reading this book – a book he had reread several times that summer – “trying to see how it worked”; that seemed a weighty recommendation. I was hesitant to read Sophie's Choice because the only scene from the movie that I've seen is where Meryl Streep, as Sophie, is forced to make her titular choice. If the plotting is so masterful that a successful author was stymied by “how it worked”, would knowing the climactic scene ruin my own experience? In a way it did, but Sophie's Choice is about so much more than the plot.
Briefly, we have Stingo – an aspiring twenty-two-year-old writer; a virginal yet libidinous cornpone from the South, only two generations removed from slave-holding – who loses his Manhattan-based editorial job and takes the opportunity to move into a cheap Brooklyn rooming-house in order to crank out his first novel. His first introduction to the neighbours upstairs is being forced to listen to their furious love-making, followed by a violent and tear-filled fight that spilled out into the hallway. By the next day, the lovebirds have made up and the frail and beautiful Sophie – a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz – and Nathan – a virile, brilliant, wealthy Jew – insist on bringing Stingo into their circle. Over the ensuing months, Stingo falls secretly and passionately in love with Sophie and grows to love and respect Nathan as a brother. While usually generous, funloving and supportive, Nathan periodically falls into rages – where he accuses Sophie of infidelity (often questioning what she did to survive Auschwitz when so many of his people had died there) and attacks Stingo over the legacy of slavery – and whenever Nathan disappears, Sophie treats Stingo as her confessor, slowly reeling out the story of how she was sent to Auschwitz, and what she did do to survive. This is basically the spoiler-free plot.
As for format, Stingo is writing from the present (of the late '70s), remembering the summer of 1947 when he first met Sophie and Nathan. Like Stingo, author William Styron had been fired from his editorial job at McGraw-Hill that summer and used the opportunity to begin his first published novel, Lie Down in Darkness – the plot of which is identical to what Stingo was writing – and with this authorial distance, Stingo/Styron is able to tell the reader about that novel's eventual success and the other book ideas he had that summer, all of which were eventually written by Styron. Not only does this semi-autobiographical format lend credibility to the story of Sophie and Nathan, but as the author is looking back, he is able to point out flaws in his own youthful thinking and the irony of believing that Southern Blacks were happy folk in the decades before the Civil Rights Movement.
Stingo is also able to reflect on the current (1970s) upsurge in Holocaust memoirs and dismiss, by name, those survivors like Elie Wiesel who had written that fiction isn't an appropriate approach to understanding this particular form of evil as, in Wiesel's opinion, it cheapens and drains his own experience of its substance. While acknowledging Wiesel's concern, Stingo believes he has the right (and perhaps the duty) to write about Sophie's experience because, Although she was not Jewish, she had suffered as much as any Jew who had survived the same afflictions, and – as I think will be made plain – had in certain profound ways suffered more than most. Now, isn't that a bold declaration to make right near the beginning of this book? Quoting Elie Wiesel's objection and dismissing it because his own fictional narrative will show how the Holocaust was a universal atrocity, not solely a Jewish-focused one? I found this to be so shocking when I read it that I wasn't surprised to learn afterward that Sophie's Choice was a highly controversial book when it was first released: not only did Styron admit in interviews that his intent was to downplay the Holocaust as a specific attack on Jews (seeing it rather as a murderous thrust against 'the entire human family'), but by stressing the work-them-til-they-die slave labour conditions for non-Jews at Auschwitz, Styron was also able to compare Nazi slavery with Southern American slavery, and make the latter seem kindly in the comparison. These political undercurrents are never far from the surface in Sophie's Choice and I must admit they made me squirm.
As for the writing, Styron's voice is very much like the other big male American voices of the 20th century – Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Gore Vidal – and the storytelling is masculine, intelligent, and adult. Sex is constantly on Stingo's mind – which is probably fair for a 22-year-old virgin – and while this involves a constant stream of frank and salty language, much of the humour comes from his frustrated encounters with a string of “sure things”. The vocabulary is challenging, but not frustratingly so, and while I wasn't struck by any lovely bits of prose, the straightforwardness of the writing seemed to underline the fact that Stingo is reporting not inventing. There are many many references to other authors and classical music, much of it outside of my own knowledge base. As I was reading, I was constantly in mind of Gregory Donne trying to figure out “how it worked” and I can only assume that he meant the tricky nature of Sophie's story: When she first met Stingo, nearly the first words out of Sophie's mouth were a lie, and as they got to know each other better, she would correct these early misdirections, add a bit more to her narrative, go back and fill in some important missing information, go on and go back, so that the reader's estimation of Sophie's life goes from romance to tragedy. It takes nearly the whole of the book to really get to know Sophie – her titular choice takes place on page 529 of the 562 pages in my edition – and that isn't even the last choice that she'll need to make.
Like with a lot of the great male American writers of the 20th century, I can certainly appreciate what Styron has written here without having been personally very moved by it. I can acknowledge that Sophie's Choice is a classic without having loved it, and I feel a bit weasly giving it four stars without having loved it. In this case, four stars is meant to represent my sense that Sophie's Choice ought to be widely read; if not for the revisionist history then for the snapshot it provides into the mind of William Styron; a man who felt the need to respond thusly to his era's proliferation of Holocaust survivor memoirs. I found so many interesting webpages after finishing this book, and here are a few:
Elie Wiesel's response to the movie adaptation of Sophie's Choice.
Rudolph Hoess' daughter describing her loving father and beautiful childhood in the shadow of Auschwitz.
A scholarly analysis of Sophie's Choice in which the author explains how the deliberate misinterpretations Styron's characters make of the authors they quote suggests that Styron's point wasn't just that Sophie was a more tragic victim of Nazism than the Jews, but that as a sort of collaborator, her religious beliefs were exactly the kind of Christian anti-Semitism that made the Holocaust possible.
I think that the sheer quantity of scholarly and literary response to Sophie's Choice argues for its importance (even if it didn't personally blow me away; it's really too bad I wasn't shocked by that climactic scene when it came, but I suppose that's the risk of reading a classic so long after its release).
