Sophie's Choice
Styron's 1979 Holocaust novel, told from Brooklyn through a Southern writer's encounter with Sophie, a Polish survivor. Her secret (the choice that gives the novel its title) is among the most shattering revelations in American fiction. A novel about guilt, survival, and the impossibility of testimony.
The opening sits inside a publishing-house job and its grievances, and readers call the whole first movement “ego-driven ramblings of a young man who hasn’t lived much.” The proportions are the real complaint: “Stingo and his raging erection” takes page after page while the woman whose story this supposedly is stays “just a prop,” visible only through him. Her English is too polished for a Polish survivor, and the narrator reports her private experience he could not plausibly have had access to. In a book past five hundred pages, readers name “several fifty or hundred page chapters I could have done without.” Critics of the day called it “skin-deep psychosexual melodrama.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
