Book Club Made Me Read It | Sophie's Choice
I’m a member of a small, informal, friends and friends-of-friends book club. We try to read one book every five weeks or so. The rules are simple: Everyone gets an opportunity to pick a book for the book club to read. Each member must pick a book that they have not personally read before and each member is responsible for leading the discussion after we read their selection. Sometimes the books are good. Sometimes they are not. I review them here regardless of their quality.
I’m a bitch and don’t care about ruining the experience for you, so I’m going to include spoilers whenever I please. That’s your only warning. Proceed at your own risk.
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
Sophie’s Choice is dense and complicated. It is a bleak and tragic story told by a naive, egotistical narrator preoccupied with getting his dick wet. William Styron’s writing verges on the Faulknerian, if only Faulker had been a bit more interested in describing the curves of a fine woman’s ass.
I enjoyed it a great deal, and most of the rest of my book club hated it. It is not an uplifting, feel-good sort of book. Should you read it? That depends. How hard do you like to think about your reading, and how meandering can you handle your prose being?
In lieu of an actual review, I offer a brief synopsis followed by a half-assed academic paper about the book.
Synopsis: In 1947, a young southern man, the narrator Stingo, moves to New York and takes a room in a boarding house, where he hopes to write his first novel. He becomes close friends with two other residents of the boarding house, Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, who have a volatile romantic relationship. Nathan is prone to flying off into jealous, violent rages. Sophie, a Holocaust survivor, is beautiful and gentle and infinitely forgiving, and Stingo, of course, falls hopelessly in love with her. The present-day action of the book follows the relationships between these three characters over the course of a summer. During this time, Sophie tells Stingo about her past, including her time in Auschwitz and her efforts to save her son, who was brought to the camp with her. It is eventually revealed that Sophie also had a daughter, but that upon arrival at the camp, she was forced to choose which of her children should be sent immediately to the gas chamber. When Nathan accuses Sophie and Stingo of having an affair and threatens to kill them both, the two flee New York together; Stingo plans to bring Sophie to a farm owned by his family and marry her. Sophie instead goes back to New York, and she and Nathan commit suicide together.
Lit Nerd Blither Blather: Sophie’s Choice has some marked similarities to one of my favorite books: Wuthering Heights is a tale primarily about two compelling, damaged people who are drawn to each other obsessively, who cannot find happiness together but cannot bear to be apart. Styron trades the British moors for Brooklyn in his story, but the magnetism and destructiveness of the relationship at the core of Sophie’s Choice certainly bears some distinct parallels to Emily Brontë's only novel, which is centered on the passionate and ultimately doomed love affair between Heathcliff and Catherine, and on the fallout wrought by their savage feelings. Styron’s version of Heathcliff is Nathan — magnetic, brilliant, and a drug-addicted schizophrenic; his Catherine is Sophie — a gentle, beautiful, and guilt-ridden Auschwitz survivor. Lockwood, the wealthy gentlemen seeking a quiet retreat from the city, becomes Stingo, the poor aspiring author hoping to broaden his experience; neither is entirely reliable as far as narrators go and both filter parts of the story through their own biases and beliefs.
If Sophie’s Choice is in some ways a Wuthering Heights analogue, though, it is without the “happy ending” of sorts that Brontë's novel offers. Heathcliff and Catherine are destructive forces that threaten to (and sometimes do) consume everyone around them, but in the end their passing allows new growth to bloom in the form of a romance between Catherine’s daughter and Heathcliff’s ward. Catherine and Heathcliff’s deaths are a necessary part of the healing process for the small world on the moors, but Sophie and Nathan just die. There is no healing, no regrowth, just senseless grief dulled eventually by time.
This sheer meaninglessness, is one of the key overarching themes of Sophie’s Choice. It’s a book that seems frequently to yearn towards meaning and yet has strong undercurrents of nihilism. “I don’t have any answer. Do you have an answer?” laments Nathan’s brother Larry after he has revealed Nathan’s schizophrenia diagnosis to the narrator. “Sometimes I think life is a hideous trap” (466).
Narrator Stingo constantly strives to make meaning out of the events in his life. He receives an unexpected financial windfall, which allows him to take lodging and focus on his writing his first novel — the money, recently unearthed in the basement of an old family home, represents the proceeds of the sale of a 16-year-old slave boy named Artiste, owned by the narrator’s great-grandfather. Stingo fancies himself an enlightened southerner, and feels significant angst over using this blood money to pay his rent, but he comforts himself that he needs the money “as badly as any black man” (34). He refers to Artiste as his “young black savior” (562) and thinks of him with a sort of guilty reverence. Rather than confront the simple truth — that he is benefiting from his family’s legacy as slave-owners — Stingo mentally reframes Artiste’s sale as a sacrifice, made for his benefit.
The novel that Stingo begins writing during his summer in boarding house is inspired by the suicide of a young woman, Maria Hunt, whom he’d had a crush on as a schoolboy. His father writes to tell him of Maria’s death and sends him a newspaper clipping, and Stingo immediately becomes morbidly preoccupied with the tidings, despite the fact that he hasn’t seen her in years, knows next to nothing about who she actually was as a person, and didn’t even know that she was also living in New York City. “Reading the article over and over again, I verged very close to a state of real upheaval, and found myself moaning aloud at this senseless story of young despair and lass. Why did she do it?” (47). It’s not long, though, before his agony turns to “a fabulous sense of discovery” (119). Why, Stingo realizes, Maria’s death needn’t be simply a meaningless tragedy — it can be the impetus for his first great novel! “It was perfectly marvelous, a gift from the sky!” (119). (This is a particularly ghoulish turn of phrase, given that Maria Hunt jumped from a window to her death.) Again, Stingo is benefiting from someone else’s tragedy, but he reimagines it as a blessing from the universe, laid upon himself.
Stingo constantly shies away from the idea that people simply do cruel things because they can, or that bad things just happen for no good reason. When Sophie tells him the story about her arrival at Auschwitz, which culminates in her daughter’s death, she does not speculate about the motives of the doctor who forced her to choose which of her children should go to the gas chamber. She doesn’t know the man’s name, let alone his inner life. But Stingo, who cannot abide a meaningless tragedy, spins a tale to make sense of these events for himself. He bestows the man with a name and a backstory and a motive of sorts. The doctor, Stingo speculates through rather tortuous logic, is a formerly devout Christian, struggling to reconcile his faith and his awful work as a member of the SS. He has conceived of forcing someone to make this awful choice in order to restore his own belief in God by proving to himself that sin exists. “This is the only way I have been able to explain what Dr. Jemand von Niemand did to Sophie when she appeared with her two little children” (532), Stingo tells the reader. With all the naive arrogance of youth, Stingo layers his own version of the story atop Sophie’s truth.
Sophie herself avoids these philosophical contortions. “Suppose I had chosen Jan to go... to go to the left instead of Eva. Would that have changed anything? …Nothing would have changed anything” (539). She has lived through incomprehensible horror and remains tormented by guilt, but she tries to move forward as best as she can. It is Stingo who feels the need to rationalize the past, to force it to make sense.
In the end, though, even Stingo is forced to admit that some things are simply incomprehensible. “No one will ever understand Auschwitz” (560). Despite Stingo’s attempts to refashion the legacy of Artiste into something meaningful, Artiste himself still died in brutal slavery. Despite Stingo’s attempts to make meaning out the Auschwitz doctor’s behavior, Sophie’s daughter Eva is still dead. The fate of her son Jan is unknown. Despite Stingo’s desire to save Sophie, despite his attempt to fit her into the narrative of his love-struck fantasy, she and Nathan are dead by their own hands. There is no analysis or reimagining that Stingo can do to change anything. In the end, all he can do is rise with the morning and keep moving forward.
Styron, William. Sophie’s Choice. 1976. Vintage International, 1992.
MY RATING: 4.5/5 stars
POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT FOR: Lush, if occasionally labyrinthine, prose. Plus a fair bit of unexpected dry humor re: the narrator’s own youthful arrogance and foolishness.
PLEASE NO MORE: I could probably do with a few less meditations on the beauty of Sophie’s ass.
SHOUT-OUT TO: Sophie herself, who, despite the narrator’s preoccupation with her body, is an interesting and fully-realized character. The sad, beautiful survivor of tragedy, the victim of an abusive relationship, Sophie could easily have been a blandly cliche damsel, but Styron make her much more than that, even if he does also spend a lot of time describing the curve of her hips.